Nearly 2,000 indigenous representatives from all over the world will gather at United Nations Headquarters in New York on Monday for the start of a two-week meeting aimed at ensuring their full participation in development while preserving their culture and identity. At the meeting, the ninth session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, they and Member States, UN agencies and civil society groups will discuss efforts to guarantee...

A handful of Jarawa tribesmen recently broke into a house in the village of Mathura in the Andaman islands. They left after taking away rice, sugar and coconut. The first people to successfully migrate out of Africa, the Jarawas came to the Andaman islands 60,000 years ago, scientists believe. Essentially hunter-gatherers, the tribespeople have traditionally survived on the raw meat of wild boar. But in the 1970s, a road (the...

The North East Students’ Organisation today demanded special constitutional status for the region to thwart the threats of increasing Chinese aggression and unabated influx from Bangladesh. NESO, the umbrella body of all student groups in the region, will soon send delegates to New Delhi to highlight the problems and hold a meeting of the Northeast MPs Forum to draw the Centre’s attention. NESO chairman Sammujjal Bhattacharyya told reporters here that...

Dubbing the Centre's talk of ceasefire and talks with naxals “non-serious,” members of democratic and civil rights organisations on Friday demanded that the state stop the military offensive, Operation Greenhunt, “against its own people” and initiate back-channel talks with the CPI (Maoist). Addressing a press conference here, writer and human rights activist Arundhati Roy said: “The government's use of the military to solve political problems is not new. The government has...

Without fertilisers, said Normal Borlaug, the world would need two billion people to volunteer to just disappear.  Obviously, it makes sense to increase the supply of fertilisers rather than to look for those volunteers. Sense, however, is in short supply in India’s fertiliser policy , and we have a supply shortage of the stuff. The domestic price of fertiliser has been static since 2002 and the domestic industry has seen...