Farmers in Uttar Pradesh's Gorakhpur district are taking to poultry business as the agriculture sector has suffered losses. Owing to increasing demand and the profit margins attached to it, growers have taken up poultry farming. To meet the shortage of poultry products in the domestic and international markets ahead of Christmas and New Year, many farmers have turned to rearing chickens. The export of poultry products has also increased by 49 percent. Om Yadav,...

As the famous sun-soaked Calangute beach gets decked up for yet another Christmas and New year parties, villagers of Shirgao situated a few kilometres away try to find new ways to escape the halo of toxic red dust that enter their drawing rooms every day. Shirgao has three mines — Chougules, Bandekar, Dempo — operating in and around the three-square-kilometre village. In the last five years, the village has turned from...

Bardani Logun sits on a plastic chair in the communal room of a hostel in Rohini, north Delhi, where she lives with her toddler, and speaks candidly about being beaten, abused and starved. She is one of countless young women from the tribal belt of India who have migrated to Delhi to find work as live-in maids, hoping to send their earnings back home to support impoverished families in Jharkhand, Orissa,...

A landless labourer dies on Christmas day after going without food for five days. Neither he nor his wife, who was a job card holder under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, knew they could demand work or avail of unemployment benefits as a right It was a death that could have been avoided. Kishen Singh, a 45-year-old landless labourer, died of hunger in Champakheda village in south Rajasthan. What...

Packaged sugar now costs Rs 46 a kilogram in the retail market and there are no signs of prices levelling off. With loose sugar also costing Rs 43-44 a kg, the poly-packed product is inexorably moving towards the Rs 50 a kg mark, with the government appearing helpless in containing the spiralling prices. The steady rise in sugar prices since the second half of last year is a consequence of...