With three small children to raise in a dirt-poor village in eastern India’s Bihar state, farm labourer Renu Devi is an unsung rural supermom who shuttles between home and field every day. But the demure 30-year-old mother does not forget to bring her children to the biannual Vitamin A rounds in Bagwanpur Rati, one of the villages in Vaishali district of Bihar. This is because Vitamin A deficiency is a major...

About eight children go missing every day in the city, according to an RTI reply by Delhi Police. Across the city, over 2161 children had gone missing within a span of 270 days this year. Of them, 603 are yet to be traced. The chilling story was disclosed by the Alliance for Peoples' Rights, an NGO, after analyzing the consolidated figures of children who went missing between January and September this...

He had been defending political dissenters since the late 1960s Eminent civil rights activist and prominent lawyer K.G. Kannabiran (81) passed away in Hyderabad after a brief illness on Thursday evening. He is survived by wife Vasanta, two daughters and a son. The last rites were performed later in the evening in the presence of family members as per his wish. Born in 1929, Mr. Kannabiran obtained master's degree in Economics and a...

When French Jesuit priest and passionate agriculturist Henri de Laulanie developed the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation for Madagascar’s poor farmers in the 1980s, he probably had no idea that millions of farmers elsewhere in the world would one day benefit from it as well. Here in India, one of the 40 countries where SRI is now in use, poor tillers of the land are even helping propagate...

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,...