The exploitation of migrant construction workers has grown alongside the expansion of the industry. It's time the government got serious about upholding the law. A recent report in The Hindu on the violation of labour laws at a massive construction site belonging to the Army Welfare Housing Organisation in Bangalore raises yet again the repeated neglect of regulations relating to the employment and welfare of workers by construction companies in India. For...

Rajasthan has emerged as the state with the highest incidence of registered atrocities against Dalits across the country. In 2010, the state recorded 51.4 cases of atrocities against Dalits per lakh population under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act. It had registered a similar number of cases in 2009 too. The latest Data from the ministry of social justice and empowerment show that five states – Uttar...

Remote controls are identified as technical devices which are used for various purposes ranging from the launching of space-ships to the monitoring of toy cars. But of late, these devices are being used to direct policies for nation states which are formally sovereign. We speak here of the powerful lobby of international credit rating agencies like Standard and Poor's (S&P), which has just delivered its sermon that India is no longer...

-The United Nations Some 15 million babies worldwide – more than one in ten births – are born too early, according to a new United Nations-backed report, released today, which calls for steps such as ensuring the requisite medicines and equipment and training health staff to promote child survival. “All newborns are vulnerable, but preterm babies are acutely so,” says Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who wrote the foreword to the report, entitled...

Online cards issued under the government's flagship rural jobs scheme will now include the beneficiary's 12-digit 'Aadhar' number issued under the Centre's multi-crore unique ID project that has drawn more brickbats than bouquets.  Over the next three months, state governments will update the registration data, including Aadhar numbers, of beneficiaries under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in an exercise to weed out ghost cards.  "This will help us assess...