The river Balasan near Siliguri carries the natural resources like stone, sand, boulders. People live on the riverside and are involved in work like collection of stones and sand, crushing the stones into different shapes and sizes and loading them into vehicles. These raw materials are...

Decentralizing authority to democratically elected local government is advised for reasons of efficiency and good governance, but equity may suffer if elites capture decision making at the local level. What safeguards can help promote equitable and participatory decentralization? This question...

If poverty and nutrition are issues also of social justice and the commitment that a democratic state makes to its citizens (namely, ridding the country of hunger and malnutrition and also of ensuring food security) then the discipline of economics needs to pose its problem differently. The...

Bill No. CXV of 2005 A Bill to empower the State Governments and the Central Government to take measures to provide for the prevention and control of communal violence which threatens the secular fabric, unity, integrity and internal security of the Nation and rehabilitation of victims of such...

On April 3, 2006, an independent commission on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), innovation and public health presented its report to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The report was commissioned by the World Health Assembly, the WHO's governing body of 192 member states. The report...

In today’s developing world the vast majority of water and electricity services are provided by public utilities. Rather than asking “who should provide the servicesâ€, the authors adopt a financing point of view and look at how access to basic utilities for all can be funded in...

This paper aims to present the act of dissent as at once unifying and divisive as a collective expression of a singular intention; it is sometimes illegal, but often represents an answerability that does not fit within the parameters of state law’s ‘justice-as-calculable’...

On November 28, 2003, roughly 300 grassroots activists, people affected by large dams and representatives from NGOs gathered in a small village in Rasi Salai district in Northeast Thailand. They met for a five-day conference on large dams under the rallying cry of “Rivers for Life.â€As...