-The Hindu   Breaking free of the traditional practice of sterilising people with mental illnesses, particularly women, a proposed law for disabled persons gives them the right to retain their fertility. Recognising the legal capacity of all persons with disabilities and making provision for support where required to exercise such legal capacity as under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the proposed new law — Rights of Persons...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

-The Economic Times The Parliamentary Standing Committee on finance has questioned the government's move to introduce a right to food bill when it did not have a single, widely-accepted definition of the poor. The "criteria of identification of the poor remains nebulous," the Yashwant Sinha-headed committee has observed. The proposed food security bill, seen as the largest such legislation anywhere in the world, hinges on the definition of the poor. The...

-NDTV   A board outside a temple for the Goddess Kali orders Dalits to stop at this point. "Harijans can pray from here," it declares. The warning sign was put up in August last year after three schoolgirls entered the shrine to offer Prasad to the Goddess, an icon of Empowerment and Shakti. The caretaker of the temple in Orissa's Puri district offers no apologies for the discrimination. "It is against tradition,"...

-The Hindu   “No positive response seen for enforcement of reservation ” The Union government is working on a mechanism of ‘voluntary disclosure' by the corporate and private sector on enhancement of employment opportunities for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other weaker sections. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a conference of State Social Justice and Empowerment Ministers here on Friday that the government had taken a number of initiatives to increase ‘affirmative action' with...