-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a chilling reminder of the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Uttar Pradesh government on Monday informed the Supreme Court that the recent riots forced over 40,000 people to flee 94 villages in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts, where 44 people were killed and places of worship of Muslims and Hindus extensively damaged. Responding to the apex court's queries, the Akhilesh Yadav government submitted a report from the...

-The Hindu Allahabad: Even as the Uttar Pradesh government blamed the circulation of a fake video on social media for aggravating communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, inflamattory and communally inciting material continued to be spread widely on social networking sites and applications. Newspapers reports, morphed with inflammatory headlines, were widely circulated through various groups on Twitter, Facebook and other mediums of social media on Monday. Two widely circulated posts were picture clippings from...

-The Hindu Batting for about 30 lakh sugarcane farmers of Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has expressed his reservation over the Central Government’s proposal to de-regulate the sugar and cane sectors, which would effectively signal an end to the State’s control over reserving the cane area of the sugar mills and fixing the procurement price for the growers. At his meeting with the Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council,...

-Tehelka Are we eating sugar which small kids are producing as bonded labour? FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Mahendra Singh used to live with his parents and two siblings in the Jahangirpuri slum area of New Delhi until the morning he was abducted, trafficked and then callously ‘sold’ to a sugarcane farmer of Haryana’s Karnal district. Mahendra was made to work as a bonded labourer in the sugarcane fields for three-and-a-half long years, until he finally...

The much-vaunted NREGA has defaulted on many of its promises “There are many households in our village who have NREGA cards but have not sought work for over two years,” says 32-year-old Umesh Kumar, gram pradhan of Bhainswal village, in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh. In fact, Kumar recounts having to actually go around persuading people to come for work “whenever we get projects for implementation under NREGA”. This first-time...