-The Hindustan Times   The much-criticised new poverty cutoff — proposed recently by the Planning Commission, it sets the bar for urban poverty at Rs 32 spent per person per day — would exclude many beggars in Mumbai, a survey has found. The survey, conducted over the past six months by University of Mumbai’s Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Centre for Social Justice in hutments across the city, found that only nine of 1,043...

-Deccan Chronicle   It was Gandhi Jayanti. But young Dalit poet Meena Kandasamy was not ready to spare the Mahatma. “Like many other Dalit writers, I have reservations about Gandhi,” she said at the DC Kovalam Literary Festival here. “He betrayed Dalits several times.” Ms Meena added the Poona Pact imposed on the nation by Mahatma Gandhi had effectively blocked the political rise of Dalits. “Dr Ambedkar agreed to it since he...

Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi sold off his business in 2003 to do something relevant. The Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai alumnus soon became a prolific user of the Right To Information Act and filed more than 800 RTI applications. He was appointed the Information Commissioner at the Central Information Commission, New Delhi, in 2008. In this freewheeling interview with rediff.com's Priyanka, Gandhi says that appellants must understand that law describes 'information' as something...

-PTI   In a bid to eradicate illiteracy in Bihar, the state government has decided to rope in 10.5 lakh class IX and X students to educate 1.2 crore adult illiterate people in Bihar. The plan will be executed under a five-month literacy campaign 'Sakshar Bharat Yojana' to be launched from November 11 next, according to an HRD official. Under the proposal, as many as 10.50 lakh class IX and X students will be...

The worse off the poor become, the healthier our Ministers get. Air India might not be doing as well we'd like it to. But the braveheart who flew it fearlessly into dense clouds of debt is doing okay. Praful Patel (who no longer holds the aviation portfolio) added, on average, over half a million rupees every day to his assets in 28 months between May 2009 and August 2011. This might...