October 9 was a Sunday. An unusual day to call an emergency meeting of Delhi University's academic council. The main agenda was fairly routine stuff: approval of certain courses. However, tucked away as supplementary agenda was a proposal to do away with A K Ramanujan's essay, 'Three Hundred Ramayanas' from the history course - a proposal that was passed, triggering one of the fiercest debates in recent times in the academic...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...

The Trinamool Congress-led government is “suppressing freedom of expression of the people of West Bengal,” litterateur and Magsaysay awardee Mahasweta Devi said here on Monday. “The people's government has come and done something that was unimaginable in the last 64 years. The people have lost their right to assemble and express their opinion at the Metro channel,” said Mahasweta Devi, who, on earlier occasions, had come out in support of Mamata...

Why is it that the Anna Hazare-led movement against corruption does not seek to have the Lokpal cover NGOs, corporate houses and the corporate media? Gautam Navlakha (gnavlakha@gmail.com) is a member of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi.   It would be churlish to dismiss “Team Anna’s” mass mobilisation which is an assertion of our collective right to protest. This is especially so in view of the fact that after having waited...

The tribal people of Chhattisgarh are in an extremely dangerous situation, caught as they are between the state forces and the Maoists. THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Soni Sori, an Adivasi schoolteacher from Chhattisgarh, was arrested in Delhi on October 4 on charges of acting as a conduit between the Essar group and the Maoists, the former accused of giving “protection money” to the latter. On October 7, she moved the Delhi High Court to...