By Himanshu Thakkar and Bipin Chaturvedi

Only four of the 12 hydropower projects in the Northeast generate at their projected 90% dependability or higher. The rest are underperforming miserably. Regardless, several big projects are under construction in the Northeast. Why don’t the stakeholders analyse the performance and impact of large hydro projects before promoting more of them?

For seven years, the local inhabitants of Dzongu in Sikkim have been opposing the hydropower project and 24 dams being built on the Teesta, which is destroying the ecology around their sacred mountain, Khangchendzonga. The quake of September 2011 came as no surprise to these indigenous people. A photo-feature by Shailendra Yashwant

Why is cutting subsidies seen as the only way to cut down the government’s fiscal deficit, asks Kannan Kasturi. What about raising additional revenues by increasing direct taxation of the rich, reducing corporate subsidies and increasing customs duty on items such as gold?

To many policymakers Gross National Happiness doesn't sound like a serious framework to measure progress by, says Swarna Rajagopalan. But isn’t it the welfare state alone which has the capacity to attempt the scale of intervention and programming required to assure each Indian’s welfare?

By Candace Rose Rardon

In Mahinsa, an island village on Orissa’s Chilika Lake, new collective livelihood and self-help groups have helped women begin cultivating crabs for export, supplementing family incomes and giving the women a sense of ownership and purpose

Crimes against scheduled castes have actually increased, according to the government’s own figures. But a fact-finding team in Tamil Nadu, where on September 11, 2011 serious police atrocities against dalits were committed, found that the district administration had little awareness about laws and measures for combating crimes against scheduled castes and tribes, writes K S Subramanian

Why is the health, education and nutritional status of SCs, STs and minorities in Tamil Nadu and Kerala so much better than their counterparts in states like UP and Bihar? The India Human Development Report 2011 suggests that this is the result of good governance and massive mobilisation of the lower castes in the southern states, writes Subhash Gatade

We are already spending Rs 67,310 crore on food subsidies. The National Food Security Bill will increase this by only Rs 30,000 crore, just 4% of the corporate taxes that are being booked as revenues foregone, says Sachin Kumar Jain. The added expenditure will still mean a subsidy of only Rs 3.25 per person per day

The draft National Pharmaceuticals Pricing Policy 2011 brings 348 essential drugs under price control, but what about non-essential drugs, which are the bulk of those sold and which can be priced several times higher than their manufacturing cost, asks S Srinivasan

That inequality is rising in India is not surprising, considering that the centre offers Rs 4.6 lakh crore in tax exemptions and incentives to industrialists, compared to Rs 1.54 lakh crore in subsidies to the poor and farmers. But the solutions a new OECD report offers will increase, not reduce, inequality, says Sharmila Joshi

By Rahul Varman

Why is the Occupy Wall Street movement protesting corporate personhood? How and why did corporations come to enjoy – and exploit -- the legal rights and freedoms granted to individual citizens, even while they are exempt from the social responsibilities that go with those freedoms?

By Manshi Asher

The Himachal government has notified that the 1% free power to be made available for ‘local area development’ by hydropower producers would be distributed as annual cash transfers to ‘project-affected’ families. Is it trying to buy people’s silence in the face of increasing community opposition to hydroelectric projects?

By Rajashri Dasgupta

The very residents of the Panchanantala slum in Kolkata who are considered a nuisance by the occupants of the high-rises that surround them, who are periodically threatened with eviction and turned away even in emergencies by the specialty AMRI Hospital next door to them, risked their lives to rescue patients from the burning hospital