Failure of crops due to continuing dry season spells doom in agency The damning trend of farmer suicides seems to have arrived even in the agency areas of Adilabad district following the failure of cotton crop this season. As many as six of the 13 cotton farmers to have committed suicide since August 29 belong to the Banjara and Gond tribes. This is the first time when so many suicides among tribal...

Chikkamade Gowda had once told the Centre to give him poison. It was better than being evicted from his forest habitat. That was in 1974. Thirty-seven years on, the Soliga tribal and some 16,500 fellow sufferers are celebrating their homecoming, thanks to a landmark central amendment. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2008, allows them to use nearly 60 per cent of their ancestral land,...

Team Anna is worried that it is increasingly coming across as the “B team” of the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Today, Anna Hazare said he wanted to restructure his team to include Muslims, Dalits, tribals and young people. It was the latest of many U-turns that Hazare has taken in recent days, on issues such as the shape of his core committee and whether his team would campaign specifically against...

-The Hindu Justice Markandey Katju, Chairman, Press Council of India, argues that the media has a very important role to play in helping the country make the transition from an old feudal society to a modern industrial one quickly, and without much pain. The Role the Media should be playing in India by Justice Markandey Katju, (former Judge, Supreme Court of India), Chairman, Press Council of India To understand the role which...

'Economic growth will need massive energy. Will we allow an accident in Japan, in a 40-year-old reactor at Fukushima, arising out of extreme natural stresses, to derail our dreams to be an economically developed nation?' Every single atom in the universe carries an unimaginably powerful battery within its heart, called the nucleus. This form of energy, often called Type-1 fuel, is hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times more powerful...