Action plan should be finalised to end scourge before March 2012 A plan of action should be finalised within a month or so with the target of ending the pernicious practice of manual scavenging within the 11th Plan period that ends in March 2012, sources in the Social Justice Ministry said. This was the key outcome of a two-day consultation meeting which concluded here on Tuesday. Jointly organised by the Ministries of Social...

Some of India's most prominent artists including Sharmila Tagore, Naseeruddin Shah, Aparna Sen, Mahesh Bhatt, Rahul Bose and others have written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh protesting against the imprisonment of Human Rights activist Binayak Sen. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on sedition charges by the Additional District and Sessions Court at Raipur last month. 61-year-old Sen, a paediatrician by profession, was arrested in May 2007 in Bilaspur on...

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...

The Election Commission feels that the situation in Bengal is “worse than anticipated” and that the ground realities necessitate “an exclusive plan of action” for conducting the Assembly elections this year, according to sources. The commission made the observations after going through a report submitted by a six-member team that visited the state last week. The “exclusive plan of action” will have a bearing on the number of phases for the elections,...

Ilina Sen, wife of activist Dr Binayak Sen, was on Monday booked by Wardha police for not informing them about the participation of foreign nationals in 13 th National conference for the Indian Association of Women's Studies (IAWS) organized under her supervision at Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University. The four-day conference concluded on Monday. The cops have also booked the in-charge of the accommodation committee of the conference. The offences against...