-The Hindustan Times The country recorded a marginal fall in atrocities against dalits in 2010 over the previous year. The conviction rate for atrocities improved by 5.5%, but what alarms is the high pendency rate of 78.7%. Though the Mayawati government ensured a drop in atrocities on SCs, evident by a fall of 1,189 cases over 2009, UP still tops the chart for such cases. The state recorded 6,272 cases forming 19.2%...

Untouchability hasn’t been banished in all its forms, a meeting of state ministers with the Centre concluded today and expressed anguish at the dismal conviction rate in crimes against dalits. “Untouchability is gone, but only the face of it, as its definition changes. Banks deny credit to dalits and this is another form of untouchability,” Union home minister P. Chidambaram said at the specially convened meeting as part of the two-day...

Sessions court in Ara district had sentenced them in May 2010 The Patna High Court has acquitted all the 23 persons accused of perpetrating the massacre of 21 dalits at Bathani Tola in Bhojpur in 1996. The accused were convicted by the sessions court in Ara district and sentenced in May 2010. While three persons were awarded capital punishment, the remaining twenty were handed life imprisonment. A Division Bench of judges Navneeti Prasad...

-The Hindustan Times Dalit students’ assertion of the right to eat beef — a tradition in Andhra Pradesh — triggered a riot with the right wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad activists at Osmania University in Hyderabad on Sunday. Even after the overnight clash that left five persons injured and two vehicles torched was brought under control, the campus — a hotbed of the Telangana statehood movement — remained tense on Monday. The...

-The Hindu Dalit rights groups in Bantwal attempted to stop the official celebration of Ambedkar Jayanti on Saturday citing the Government's “failure” to take action to fulfil its constitutional mandate of uplifting the conditions of the poor. Eye-witnesses said the groups initially requested the officials and guests assembled not to conduct the proceedings as planned. When they decided to go ahead ignoring the warnings, the dalits reportedly took away the portrait of...