P Sainath on the hyper-commercialisation of the Indian media; and a structural compulsion to avoid covering important issues of rural India.

China’s anti-pastoralist policies in Tibet are not only culturally insensitive but environmentally disastrous.

N S Jodha speaks to emHimal/em about CPRs in rural Southasia; and the role of the state, the market and the communities themselves in the process.

Life is so much better in the village; what are we doing sitting around here?

As times change in rural Bihar, so does the social texture of the village.

Between Gandhi’s self-sufficient, harmonious idyll and Ambedkar’s den or ignorance and narrow-mindedness lies the village of reality.

In India over the past decade, farmer suicides are linked to an agrarian crisis brought about by market reforms gone wrong.

India’s government is going the ‘agritech’ route while low-input organic farming is better suited to smallholder farming households.

The change that India’s national scheme for rural employment guarantee, touching the lives or more than 100 million people, has accomplished is hard to fathom.

How a village became the name of a fear.

In rural Sindh, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

With politics at a standstill in Kathmandu, governance should be shifting to the local levels. In fact, the national is holding the local hostage.

Even as Sri Lanka’s smallholder agriculture dies a slow death, schemes to save the rural economy are only coming from urban intellectuals.

Far from being a panacea for fighting rural poverty, microcredit can impose additional burdens on the rural poor.

In the debate over the use of ‘drone’ technology in Pakistan, many are claiming to speak for the communities on the ground. But what about the impact that this new mode of warfare is having on international law?

The Indus floods of 2010 have left more than 1700 people dead, more than two million homeless, and have directly or indirectly affected around 20 million people in Pakistan, devastating a country that was already battling a number of existential threats. Moreover, almost two months after the first flash-floods hit Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (the former NWFP) in late July, the tragedy has by no means ended – it will not for years to come.

Will the state’s elections offer a new template for the state – or old wine in a new bottle?

The vehemence of the caste councils of North India against same-clan marriages have to do with the control of high-value real estate land and inheritance rights.em style=/em

  Near the two-year anniversary of Mohammed Nasheed’s election in the Maldives, democracy in the atolls continues to experience growing pains, made more difficult by an increasingly bipolar polity.

In the run-up to Burma’s fraught polls, some of the junta’s leading cheerleaders are Western governments who are bending over backwards to justify their stance.

With the passage of the 18th Amendment, the last real impediment to the Rajapakse dynasty has been removed.

Running into problems of supply even as the military establishment begins to import drone technology, India is working full speed to develop its own line of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Five centuries ago, cannabis was the toast of the British Royal Society.

Accumulating and then dredging up perfectly dispensable information in response to pointless questions is not something for the crazies alone.

Contrary to the recent hubbub over the ‘discovery’ of tigers living at high altitudes in Bhutan, a Nepali wildlife biologist made this finding almost a decade ago – but never received credit.