I read Aman Sethi's piece on the Saranda Development Plan (“Nine months on, police camps sole development in Saranda plan”, June 4) with great interest but with greater anguish. Before I deal with his main charge — that private mining interests are behind the SDP — I want to lay out what the SDP is all about. It is the first systematic experiment in combining a security-oriented and development-focussed approach...

Araria, Bihar: If the government had bought bicycles to give them to schoolgirls, you would have had a bicycle scam in Bihar, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar famously said, explaining why he gave bicycle vouchers to families. But when it came to giving land to landless Mahadalit families — the poorest and most marginalised of Dalits — the government forgot this wisdom.   Result: Allegedly acting in concert, government officials and brokers ganged...

-The Indian Express Inmates of the Apna Ghar shelter in Rohtak told a four-member committee that visited them today that they were gangraped by Haryana Police officials, who made them dance naked and forcibly took them out of the home. According to sources, two of the inmates — one deaf and mute and the other mentally challenged — said that when they got pregnant, the incharge of the home stepped on their...

-The Hindu Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's decency and politics of reconciliation have been his undoing Last fortnight I had cloistered myself away in the hills for a spot of reflection and writing. I had chosen to deprive myself of blessings like newspapers, the television and internet; telephone connectivity was at best erratic and in any case it was turned off most of the time. During one occasional moment of connectedness I got...

Delhi government's long pending Delhi Registration of Marriage Bill ran into trouble on Monday with some MLAs raising questions on its implications on the Muslim community.  Objecting to the Bill being passed in the Assembly, Lok Janshakti Party MLA Shoaib Iqbal said that women can misuse the Bill to deny being divorced. They can also misuse it to get a claim in their husbands' property or to harass them after the...