The impending BPL Census exercise will not help the poor; on the contrary, it will further deny them a fair share in national resources. The BPL, or Below Poverty Line, Census 2011 for the rural areas will start in select States this month. In a country such as India with vast numbers of the poor, counting the poor often becomes an exercise in undercounting and dividing them, to suit the wholly...

In the first of a series of reports on land rights, we look at the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where there have been violent clashes between local villagers and police in a dispute over land. It's a hot summer day and the air is thick with smoke from the diesel-powered trucks carrying bricks, cement and sand. There is a long line of vehicles along the road as the trucks jostle...

-The Times of India   Farmers agitation against land acquisition in Kolayat in Bikaner district started on a violent note on Tuesday when thousands of protestors clashed with police and smashed a couple of government vehicles. The farmers led by local MLA and former minister Devi Singh Bhati were demanding better compensation for their lands acquired by the state government and a rehabilitation package on the lines of that given by...

-Express News Service   Even as irregularities in the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) have been making headlines, a discrepancy in the scheme was reported from Dumuriput village under Padampur panchayat in Koraput block. Vehicles have been put to use and only a minimum number of job card-holders engaged in the construction work of approach road to the village from the old national highway. The work started a few...

Bhatta Parsaul was once a quiet farming village but now, as it finds itself at the centre of a major political row, it is strewn with mounds of ash, burnt-out motorcycles, Tractors and cars. In early May villagers here clashed with armed police who tried to break up a four-month-old sit-in protest at the village. They had been fighting the terms of the acquisition of their farmland in the Greater Noida...