-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...

-PTI NEW DELHI: India's economic development has led to the worsening of air quality in major Indian cities, according to the results of a survey by The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. The transport sector was ranked the highest followed by factories in and around the city as the second highest contributor towards air pollution in Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai. While respondents from Bangalore...

-Tehelka.com There are few figures from the adivasi community in India who have made a bigger dent in the collective imagination of the country than Dayamani Barla. The "iron lady of Jharkhand" has been instrumental in articulating adivasi struggles against displacement and deprivation on national and international platforms. Dayamani, who was recently imprisoned in Jharkhand for her involvement in the Nagri people's movement, has won the first Ellen L Lutz Indigenous...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...

-The Hindu Instead of opening a debate on the Gadgil panel's report on the Western Ghats, the government has chosen to sideline and replace it with another by an alternate group This is a challenging time in India's development history where a number of tenets of environmental governance are being questioned by the imperative of growth. Environmental governance in India is under assault, and is thus in need of both fresh thinking,...