By Darryl D'Monte

Since the time the US army dropped the terrible defoliant, Agent Orange, on the Vietnam countryside, war and conflict have had a devastating impact on people and the environment

By Teresa Rehman

Rampant habitat destruction has forced Assam’s elephants into close contact with humans. It is now all-out war between hungry elephants and angry tea estate workers. And still the forest department, the tea authorities and the district administration keep passing the buck

By Anup Sharma

Former Bodo militants have surrendered their guns but are still at war – against poachers and the timber mafia that are destroying the Subankhata Reserve Forest in Assam’s Baksha district

By Subrat Kumar Sahu

The first of a series on community forestry initiatives in Orissa, researched as part of the Infochange Media Fellowship 2009, discusses how India’s forests came to be controlled and owned by the state after 1855, placing the state in perpetual conflict with forest-dependent communities

By Sandhya Srinivasan

Fifteen per cent of India’s 2.5 million HIV-positive are children. That’s 375,000 children, with 50,000 being born infected or becoming infected each year. The government has woken up to the tragedy of women and children infected or affected by AIDS and held a series of public hearings across the country recently

By Rimjhim Jain

Organised networks of HIV-positive people have penetrated to the districts where they are active in reaching out to each and every identified positive person to bring them their rights. Most prevention and care programmes by both national and international bodies closely liaise now with DLNs to ensure the success of their projects

By Manjima Bhattacharjya

The Supreme Court of India recently asked the government why they don’t legalise prostitution if they can’t curb it. But do women in sex work really want a piece of paper called a license? Or police reforms that may lead to freedom from extortion, convictions against traffickers rather than new laws, directives and campaigns that make discrimination against women in prostitution legally punishable and socially condemnable?

By Kalpana Sharma

The growth rate of motorised vehicles in India, at 10%, is higher than growth in GDP. India’s National Urban Transport Policy professes to keep people rather than vehicles as its focus. Yet it is private motorised transport that gets all the attention in our metros, not public transport

By Maheen Mirza

Malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh is much higher than the national averages for India. And MP’s urban poor are worst-affected. This is the first in a series of articles, researched as part of the Infochange Media Fellowships 2009, that analyse the food security of the urban poor who reside in the slums of Bhopal

Mahasweta Devi, the formidable literary talent and relentless fighter of many causes, talks to Anosh Malekar about the inequity in our society and why it’s necessary for every Indian to raise a voice against injustice

By Somnath Mukherji

In its continuing coverage of the cyclone-affected Sunderbans, Infochange finds some 700 families in the K-plot island close to starvation. Nothing grows here any more, and rice is priced at Rs 22/kg. Villagers are desperate for work under NREGS

Following severe criticism of media handling of the 26/11 terror attacks on Mumbai you’d think media coverage of the recent blast at German Bakery in Pune would be different. But the same kind of speculative and insensitive reporting has been witnessed once again, says Kalpana Sharma

Violent conflicts between tribal communities, and between militant groups and the Indian State, have plagued the northeastern states of Nagaland, Tripura and Manipur for so many years that children born in Manipur after 1980 have never known the meaning of peace. In the absence of comprehensive official studies, K S Subramanian uses his own field experience and that of others to record the devastating effect of the conflicts on women and children