-The Indian Express Sixty-four years after caste untouchability was abolished by the Constitution, more than a fourth of Indians say they continue to practise it in some form in their homes, the biggest ever survey of its kind has revealed. Those who admit to practising untouchability belong to virtually every religious and caste group, including Muslims, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Going by respondents' admissions, untouchability is the most widespread among Brahmins, followed...

-Economic and Political Weekly The current regime seeks to reform labour laws with the understanding that these reforms will improve industrial growth and expand the possibilities of enterprise. However, there is already ample evidence from within India that this obsession with reforming labour law, particularly in the way the government has done it till now, will not take us any closer in creating more jobs or a healthy industrial sector. These...

-The Hindu 30 per cent of rural and 20 per cent of urban households said they practised untouchability Just five per cent of Indians said they had married a person from a different caste, says the first direct estimate of inter-caste marriages in India. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS), conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland, also reported that 30 per cent of rural...

-Tehelka The new and improved Bill to prevent atrocities against Dalits runs the risk of being put in the cold storage A crime against Dalits happens every 18 minutes - three women raped every day, 13 murdered every week, 27 atrocities every day, six kidnapped every week and so on. This is the data compiled by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, an NGO, which paints a grim picture of Indian...

-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...