Erratic power supply, poverty bane of Marathwada region  About four lakh people migrate every year to work as sugarcane cutters Sugar factories contribute to water scarcity DHAITANA (Beed district): The Assembly elections are not the reason for excitement in this village located in the backward Marathwada region of Maharashtra. It’s water. In the afternoon heat, women and children are running towards the only source of water located outside sarpanch Achyut Gangane’s house....

Social audit of rural jobs scheme promises to empower people Social audit of rural jobs scheme promises to empower people with information about how they are being denied the benefits of the schemes meant for them. Something comes between entitlements and beneficiaries when it comes to social sector schemes. It is not necessarily corruption or greed of the providers. It is the ignorance of the beneficiaries. If one were to drive through villages...

Indian-American human rights activist Mallika Dutt has won the American Courage Award for her work in the U.S. and India. The 47-year-old, who grew up in Kolkata and left for the U.S. at the age of 18, will receive the award on October 1 from the Asian American Justice Center, a leading civil rights organisation. In 1989, Ms. Dutt co-founded ‘Sakhi,’ an organisation that helped south Asian women suffering domestic violence in...

INDIA’S achievement in setting up a huge structure of local self-government institutions has won worldwide recognition and respect. However, the massive numbers of rural self-government or panchayat raj representatives should not be allowed to obscure the reality of some very important weaknesses in our panchayat raj institutions. True, some states have notable achievements to their credit in this respect, but taking an overview of the national situation it can be...

As the 6-year-old son in an upper-class Brahmin family, Bindeshwar Pathak wanted to know what would happen if he touched a scavenger, one of India's "untouchables," stuck at the bottom of the country's social order and fated to collect and dispose of human waste. When he did, his grandmother punished him by forcing him to swallow cow dung and urine, and making him bathe in water from the Ganges. "This...