-The Hindu     In Uttarakhand, women take the lead role in reviving and maintaining civil forests under Van Panchayats even in the face of several obstacles Munni Adhikari, a resident of Dhaura Gram Sabha in Lamgara block of Uttarakhand's Almora district, lives in an idyllic setting: green slopes covered with tall pine and oak trees, wild flowers in full bloom, neat little terrace farms... While this natural splendour can instantly captivate any...

-The Hindustan Times Mumbai: Indian companies have acquired land more than nine times the size of Delhi on foreign shores, as cultivable land at home is lost to urbanisation, industry and infrastructure projects. Land Matrix, a global land monitoring initiative that tracks land dealings worldwide, placed India among the top 10 countries that have acquired large tracts of land abroad, primarily for agriculture, in Africa and Asia. The country ranks eighth,...

-The Hindu Denying basic amenities to residents of ‘unrecognised' slums is an affront to their dignity; resettling them fails to address their concerns and is unviable financially Since 2005, the Central government has given significant amounts of money to the States to improve conditions for the country's urban poor, first under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and more recently through the slow-moving Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY). Unfortunately, very few...

-The Hindu In addition to ailments caused by poverty, salt pan workers across the country suffer from several occupational diseases, including chronic dermatitis, loss of vision and hypothyroidism In Adivasi Colony, a remote hamlet off the road from Vedaranyam to Kodikarai in Tamil Nadu, most of the adults in the 200-odd households work in salt manufacturing. They prepare salt pans manually, irrigate them with saline water which is three times saltier than...

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...