Married and settled: at Class III Patna: corruption is indeed an arena where the Indians from all parts of the country show their innovative best. You may well imagine officials at all levels neglecting their work, their feet up on the table and staring at the blank walls, waiting for ideas, till the eureka moment arrives. Or else, you may imagine them in a huddle, in a heated debate over the ‘right way’, the ‘foolproof way’ to beat the system. All that remains to be done then is to decide on a close circle of beneficiaries as accomplices so the matter doesn’t come... 

  Kalahandi: from starvation to record produce! Bhubaneswar: Kalahandi for decades has stood for starvation and utter poverty. But the image needs to be modified now in the light of some new facts. Odisha’s Kalahandi district — once the cause of global embarrassment for India due to its high number of starvation deaths — today stands tall with a five-fold increase in its rice production since 1999, figures reveal. The agriculture ministry’s recent crop data ranks Kalahandi among the top 25 rice producing districts of India. The three-year average of its rice production ending 2010-11... 

by Ratnakar Tripathy Why agricultural productivity remains low in Bihar is by itself a clichéd question carrying an air of obviousness. The big landlord is either dormant or has better things to do than agriculture, a job in Patna for example. His sharecroppers are too uncertain about their land-holdings to invest seriously. When they are willing, they don’t have the knowhow or the resources. Those willing may also have too small a piece of land to take a risk or make a difference. In brief, it’s a vicious circle that no land reform based on redistribution may be able to solve. To put it... 

  Lychee: More than meets the eye! Patna: often with diseases and other phenomena, when a strong statistical correlation is found, it’s time to look deeper into the matter. Earlier, Muzaffarpur reminded everyone of Lychees, but these days, it has become associated with the killer disease of encephalitis. So the question is – is there a correlation between the heavenly fruit and the diabolical disease? Thus a team of experts from the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), New Delhi, has flown down to Bihar amidst reports that three children, suspected to have been afflicted with acute... 

    From Mandi to market! Ahmadabad: Seven IIM-A students are set to replicate the “Amul model” in the agri-belt of Bihar as part of their summer internship during which they will work for Bihar’s rural livelihood initiative Jeevika for eight weeks. “As in ‘Amul model’ where dairy farmers go and provide milk to collection centres, we have proposed common procurement centres at the village level where farmers can give their for agricultural produce. They can then be stocked at a district procurement centre, which will have a cold storage facility run by... 

  Dalit icons: a street artist’s display Chennai: Four states account for nearly half of the country’s dalit population, reveals the 2011 census. Uttar Pradesh stands first with 20.5% of the total scheduled caste (SC) population, followed by West Bengal with 10.7%, says the data released by the Union census directorate on Tuesday. Bihar with 8.2% and Tamil Nadu with 7.2 % come third and fourth. Dalits form around 16.6% of India’s population. The 2011 census recorded nearly 20.14 crore people belonging to various scheduled castes in the country. As per the 2001 census, the... 

  By Abhishek Choudhary Dulari Devi: and her wall painting “I can’t make much sense of this book, except that it has one of my paintings!” Dulari Devi told me in her understated but an occasionally proud voice, passing me her copy of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, as we sat in her small, colourful verandah in Ranti village in Bihar’s Madhubani district. A few days before I met her in mid-February, Devi had returned home from a trip to Delhi after attending an exhibition on the Mithila art, that showcased some of her paintings. She explained to me her... 

  Jharkhand, Bihar: the burden of gun! Gaya: According to the latest press reports, heavy battle between members of the CPI (Maoist) and its offshoot the Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) in Jharkhand’s Chatra district is a battle for the turf and comes as a heavy blow for the Maoists in the Bihar-Jharkhand belt, once a declared Maoist bastion. “The fight between the two groups has resulted in the killing of senior Maoist leaders like Lalesh Yadav and Praful. It is also a sign of the deep incursion of the TPC into the Gaya-Palamu area,” said a senior government official, while admitting... 

  As a language vanishes! Vadodara: February 21 is the International Mother Tongue Day, chosen after the date in 1952 when students demonstrating for recognition of their language as one of two national languages of then Pakistan were killed in Dhaka. Concluding his ambitious marathon Peoples’ Linguistic Survey of India,(PLSI) which took four years of field work preceded by nearly 15 years of conceptualization and planning, Prof Ganesh Devy, the Sahitya Akademi award winner, literary critic and founder of the Tribal Academy at Tejgarh declares that out of 1,600-odd languages listed in... 

    Nalanda: Record breaking potatoes Patna: Bihar’s farmers have done it again. A farmer from Sohdih village of Bihar’s Nalanda district has set a new world record in potato production through organic farming this year. The potato farmer, Rakesh Kumar, has harvested 108.8 tonnes of potato per hectare and set a new world record in potato production, Nalanda district magistrate Sanjay Kumar Agrawal said on Monday. Last year, a farmer of Darveshpura village in Nalanda had set a world record in potato production through organic farming. “Rakesh Kumar has created a new...