-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh -- Traditionally tagged as 'Bimaru' states -- have made major progress in urban municipal reforms in recent years, while Delhi has not submitted any claim of reforms. States such as Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, which have always performed better, lead from the front again in the assessment by the urban development ministry. The assessment is based...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court has asked the Centre to examine a doctor's claim that India's "unscientific" tuberculosis protocol stipulates an inadequate medicine regime to cut costs, thus promoting relapses and generating lethal drug-resistant strains. The court did not issue a formal notice to the government but asked additional solicitor-general Maninder Singh to talk to the petitioner, Raman Kakar, and get back to the court. Kakar has argued that the current...

-The Hindu The sense of impunity that drives discrimination against Dalits is at the heart of recent demands for the dilution, or even repeal, of the Act for prevention of atrocities against SCs and STs It is the sense of impunity nurtured by caste hierarchy that prepares the social ground for the “shockingly cruel and inhumane” crimes against Dalits called atrocities. It is this impunity that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled...

-The Hindu NABARD to manage Rs. 77,000-cr. corpus for scheme. India’s apex rural-development bank will manage a Rs. 77,000-crore corpus as part of a Central government push to complete 99 unfinished irrigation projects across the country by 2019, and bring water to 76.03 lakh hectares. The contours of the scheme were first made public by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech this February and involve finishing 149 projects overdue since...

Access to land and its resources is important since it determines the extent of poverty and deprivation one faces. Historically tribal populations and other Traditional forest dwellers did not enjoy any legal entitlement such as ownership rights or user rights of the forest lands where they had been living since ages, both communally and individually. The Forest Rights Act (FRA) is, thus, seen as a progressive legislation that attempted to...