Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...

The Bengal government today pushed through a controversial bill that will empower the state panchayat department to create a parallel school education system with nearly 20,000 rural schools. The West Bengal Panchayat Board of Education Bill had fuelled widespread concern at its conception itself but the Left government bulldozed the legislation through the Assembly today in the face of a walkout by the combined Opposition. At the root of the overdrive appears...

Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan said here on Sunday that the State government would initiate action against officials of the Agriculture Department and Plantation Corporation of Kerala Ltd. who endorsed the use of Endosulfan in Kasaragod district.Speaking after inaugurating Karshaka Bhavanam at Anayara here, he said a section of agricultural scientists who certified the use of the deadly pesticide were also responsible for the human tragedy caused by exposure to Endosulfan.The...

Some 350 million people living in rural areas being lifted out of extreme poverty in the past decade, according to The Rural Poverty Report, published by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations (UN) agency. However, in spite of this, more than a billion people around the world still continue to suffer. The UN describes extreme poverty as living on less than $1.25 (80p) a day. But factors such as...

The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty lungis, were fixed upon him. A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil to rehabilitate farmland. The soil had never arrived, and about $4,000 was missing. The...