-The Telegraph The number, according to the figures reported by the states in 2015, was around 13,770. The latest survey found 20,596 manual scavengers in 2018 New Delhi: Manual scavenging has been banned since 1993 but there has been little impact on the ground. The latest data from a survey conducted by the National Safai Karamcharis Finance & Development Corporation this year on manual scavengers has found their number has risen by over...

-The Hindu Bhuira's women are coping with the higher workload by creating vastly more flexible family and community structures. And they are simultaneously pushing towards modernity much faster than their neighbours. Everyone in the village sneaks a glance when Upasana Kumari drives her White Maruti 800 to work. “Driving a car is intoxicating,” says Kumari. A winding, muddy, single lane road that starts from the edge of the hillock where Kumari’s house...

-Mongabay.com * December 2018 is the official deadline for the land acquisition for the bullet train project but till now not even one percent of the required land is acquired. A court case is already going on in the Gujarat High Court against the land acquisition process undertaken by the Gujarat government. * Despite documents showing that the project has the potential to cause social conflict and have adverse environmental impacts, the...

-TheWire.in Activists have argued that the purchasing power of the Rs 200 per month pension initiated in 2007 has already come down to Rs 93. New Delhi: On Sunday, about 10,000 elderly people from across the country came together at a Pension Parishad protest organised at Jantar Mantar in the capital demand universal pension rights for the elderly, single women, persons with disabilities, and other poor and vulnerable workers of the unorganised...

-The Hindu Business Line Hounded for her documentary on the horrors of manual scavenging, filmmaker Divya Bharathi holds up a mirror to social indifference A conspiracy of silence — that’s how filmmaker Divya Bharathi describes the uneasy quiet that shrouds the death of men and children in sewage tanks. Earlier this month, when six men choked to death in Delhi, the reaction was on expected lines — nothing beyond knee-jerk moves, she...