Several civil society and trade union organizations are getting together in Delhi over the next week to protest against the proposed cash for food scheme of the Delhi Government and to press for a more fair and equitable criterion of identification of BPL families, in the National Capital. BPL families living in slums areas, Jhuggies & unauthorized colonies are expected to participate in big numbers, say the organizers. Led...

Indian-American human rights activist Mallika Dutt has won the American Courage Award for her work in the U.S. and India. The 47-year-old, who grew up in Kolkata and left for the U.S. at the age of 18, will receive the award on October 1 from the Asian American Justice Center, a leading civil rights organisation. In 1989, Ms. Dutt co-founded ‘Sakhi,’ an organisation that helped south Asian women suffering domestic violence in...

INDIA’S achievement in setting up a huge structure of local self-government institutions has won worldwide recognition and respect. However, the massive numbers of rural self-government or panchayat raj representatives should not be allowed to obscure the reality of some very important weaknesses in our panchayat raj institutions. True, some states have notable achievements to their credit in this respect, but taking an overview of the national situation it can be...

As the 6-year-old son in an upper-class Brahmin family, Bindeshwar Pathak wanted to know what would happen if he touched a scavenger, one of India's "untouchables," stuck at the bottom of the country's social order and fated to collect and dispose of human waste. When he did, his grandmother punished him by forcing him to swallow cow dung and urine, and making him bathe in water from the Ganges. "This...

The Centre, for the first time, has undertaken a nation-wide survey of slums to profile urban household poverty and the nature of jobs held by those living on society's fringes. The survey will profile slum-dwellers by caste and religion "for properly allocating development schemes, policy-making, project formulation and implementation, and monitoring", according to an official at the Union ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation (Hupa). The survey, being conducted under Hupa,...