Rolling on

A natural secret

Policymakers don't need to go too far to eradicate poverty. The solution is as close as is a village well to a villager

Mandla Brimful of thirst

Average rainfall: 1,300 mm Irrigation: 2% of gross cropped area

Sarguja Losing battle

First district for tribal development Rampant deforestation Malnutrition and starvation deaths

Dungarpur A 'common' death

Once rich in forest and grazing land Now known as 20th century desert 68% population 'marginal and unemployed'

Phulbani Access to poverty

Sal forest worth: Rs 30,000 crore 85% population dependent on forest 65% people below poverty line

A hard rain’s falling

Sayantan Bera tells the story of a man and a state, paralysed inside the remote islands of Sundarbans

Hunger games – it’s the real India show

Tricks of diminishing returns

Clever calculations and the great wall of bureaucracy

Promoting integrated village planning

Self-sustaining rural communities could be India's answer to her disrupted ecosystem.

Job half done

25 per cent funds allocated to national rural employment scheme remain unspent

Millionaire mukhiyas

Money pumped in development schemes in Bihar is giving rise to a new breed of village heads, flush with money and flexing muscles

When villages plug in

A Consumer movement is catching on in Nepal.Communities are extending the grid to villages.This threatens to undo the effort put in small-scale …

Some nets and sunshine

Fishers in a Tamil Nadu village save cost and improve catch with solar panel-fitted boats

Scheme against jobs

Government is bent upon shrinking jobs for the poor by fundamentally changing the rural employment guarantee scheme against the advice of its …

The god of ecological things

Time to be different

The laboratory of development

Agriculture Don't fix is the government's fix

When markets do work

The road ahead

Jute, coir and waste material are set to make rural roads economic and eco-friendly

Powering people

Proliferating grassroots level activity in Orissa is empowering villagers, taking them closer to a fairytale end to unending tales of poverty and …

Green salute

Scientists at Maida's polytechnic college are r6versing the trend of rural upliftment through urban-basgd planning

Bank on people

What a new minimum livelihood programme must do, at the least

Federalism or local self-rule?

It's a great shame for India's democracy that we have to choose between the two