-IPS News RAYAGADA: Scattered across 240 sq km on the remote Niyamgiri hill range in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, an ancient tribal group known as the Dongria Kondh have earned themselves a reputation as trailblazers. Having fought – and won – a decade-long battle with a British mining giant that invested close to a billion dollars in a bauxite extraction operation in this mineral-rich area, the Dongria Kondh set an...

-Reuters NEW DELHI: As Prime Minister Narendra Modi completes one year in office, his cuts in federal welfare spending on the Poorest of India's 1.25 billion people are coming in for sharp criticism, including from within his cabinet. In a break with India's socialist past, Modi has saved money on federal social and subsidy expenditure and pumped it into an infrastructure stimulus he hopes will trigger a spurt in economic growth. The government...

-The Week Vagaries of the weather are not the only reason for Marathwada's agrarian crisis Three widows, two daughters and an overwhelming sense of grief occupy the house of the Palwes in Kekat Jalgaon in Paithan, Aurangabad. The house lost all its men there were three in the past three years. The Palwe widows, Yashoda, Chandrabhaga and Lakshmibai, and Yashoda's two daughters, Suman, 8, and Sarita, 6, live in a hut without...

-New York Times Blog There’s Poor, and then there’s ultraPoor. The ultraPoor are almost always women and largely found in Africa, South Asia and to a lesser extent, parts of Latin America. They are most often rural. They work as maids or field laborers, often paid not with wages but in food scraps. They might have just one dress or sari, and must wash a part of it at a time...

-The Indian Express Government’s insistence on acquisition is rooted in a rush to impose the Gujarat model on the rest of India. The development agenda of the Narendra Modi government implies industrialisation. The BJP’s 2014 mandate was indeed for job creation. The “neo-middle class”, which Modi defined when he was CM of Gujarat as made up of aspiring city dwellers who have just emerged from poverty, supported him more widely than the...