-The Times of India BANGALORE: Karnataka, often called a "progressive state", has the highest dropout rate among muslim students. On an average, 50,000 students from the community dropout of school each year, a majority of them at the high school level, according to a survey done by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). The average dropout rate is 6.2% compared to the national average of less than 5%. "The statistics show a worrisome trend,"...

-The Indian Express Thiruvananthapuram: Underage marriage among muslims has ignited a debate in Kerala, with the community's most influential organisation vowing to get legitimacy for the practice while political parties and women's groups have said it would be a setback when muslim girls have been making strides in education. It was triggered by a government effort to ratify underage marriages that have already taken place, because many such couples were finding...

-The Hindu When a death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...

-The Indian Express Muzaffarnagar (UP): At Muzaffarnagar, FIRs are piling up. A total of 177 FIRs pertaining to riots were handwritten in three days at a single station. Over a hundred still remain. Dealing with this deluge of complaints is one man entrusted with the task of going through each complaint and processing it into an FIR. He (he did not want to be named) was brought in specifically for rendering...

-The Hindu ‘Victims of communal carnage still struggling, socially and financially' Forbesganj/Bhagalpur: Bhajanpur village is a few kilometres off Bihar's showcase ‘four-lane,' as drivers call the highway, a far cry from the State's back-breaking roads of the past, near Forbesganj town. Residents tell us that those affected by the kaand incident, of two years ago, live a little ahead, in the Ansari basti. A bumpy ride across the village leads to Ale Rasool...