-NDTV Our journey takes us to five villages in Sehore district, Madhya Pradesh, to meet families that do not have a toilet at home. Nearly 65 per cent of households in rural areas of the state are without toilets. Prema and Tanu belong to a Scheduled Caste family of daily wagers in Ahlada Kheda. Students of Class 9 and 10, they are exposed to children from different socioeconomic backgrounds at...

-PTI New Delhi: A "callous approach" and a tendency to "unnecessarily" label documents as "secret or classified" is at the root of espionage scandals of the kind that surfaced last week, former bureaucrats have said and sought greater disclosure instead. "There have been government instructions on dealing with sensitive and classified information. There are standard operating procedures, too. In this incident, it seems someone at some level has been callous," former cabinet...

-NDTV Jaipur: A court in Rajasthan today refused to interfere with a controversial government order that set educational prerequisites for contesting village polls, disappointing thousands of candidates who stand disqualified. The High Court said it "cannot interfere with the election process" and asked for more facts on the social impact of the ordinance or executive order that requires those fighting panchayat elections to have studied till Class 8 in school and...

-The Hindu The introduction of educational qualifications as eligibility criteria for contesting panchayat elections has shocked and angered rural Rajasthan, including supporters of the ruling BJP When the literacy drive was in full force, I happened to visit a village in Ajmer district with a friend who was a civil servant. There was bold graffiti on a prominent school wall, which said: Saksharta ki kya pehchan? Upar chaddi, niche baniyan (How do...

-The Indian Express Although the prevalence of sexual violence in India is the lowest in the world (8.5 per cent in 2013), it affects 27.5 million women in the country. Rapes reported to the police as sexual violence surged from 39 per day to 93 per day in 2013. In Uttar Pradesh alone, five rapes occurred in 36 hours. Even these are underestimations, for two reasons. One is the exclusion of...