-The Telegraph   The wages for workers of the Terai and Dooars tea gardens were revised at a tripartite meeting in Calcutta today, the hike of Rs 18 making it almost equal to the amount that the workforce in the Darjeeling gardens has been getting since April this year. According to the three-year agreement, the daily wage of the workers will be Rs 85 for the current year, Rs 90 for 2012-2013 and...

The Congress rules state and the centre, but money set aside for Rajasthan’s malnourished tribal children does not reach dysfunctional crèches and other urgent needs Three-year-old Bagmati Sahariya lies listlessly on a string cot inside an unlit mud-and-thatched home in Baran district’s Amrod village, 292km south of Rajasthan’s capital Jaipur. When her father Janki Lal (36), a daily wage labourer, lifts her on his shoulder, her bony hands and legs dangle...

The word ‘hunger’ does not appear in the 12th Plan Approach Paper even once, whereas according to the latest Global Hunger Index Report, India continues to be in the category of those nations where hunger is ‘alarming’. What is worse, India is one of the three countries where the hunger index between 1996 and 2011 has gone up from 22.9 to 23.7, while 78 out of the 81 developing countries...

The tribal people of Chhattisgarh are in an extremely dangerous situation, caught as they are between the state forces and the Maoists. THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Soni Sori, an Adivasi schoolteacher from Chhattisgarh, was arrested in Delhi on October 4 on charges of acting as a conduit between the Essar group and the Maoists, the former accused of giving “protection money” to the latter. On October 7, she moved the Delhi High Court to...

Sonia Gandhi’s ambitious plan to institutionalise political monitoring of the government’s flagship programmes in states has taken off in a tentative and haphazard manner. Although she has appointed a separate Congress general secretary, Vilas Muttemwar, to oversee the monitoring system and asked all state party units to set up committees to study the implementation of the schemes, little has been achieved in the past 10 months. Many state units are yet...