-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...

-The Hindu Business Line Vikram Agnihotri can drive a car with his feet Vikram Agnihotri, 47, of Indore has no hands but he drives a modified Maruti Celerio AGS (automatic gear shift); on September 30, 2016, he got his permanent driving licence from the Indore RTO. He has since driven over 22,000 km without an incident and is the chauffeur for his proud parents. His rare achievement will soon earn him an...

-Livemint.com Fines for public urination could fatten local administrations, and actually allow them to create an army of sanitary inspectors—imagine the number of jobs that could be created A country on the move needs a slogan, so may I humbly suggest one: because a man’s got to go when a man’s got to go. That’s the perfect slogan for a country where most men think it’s OK to pee anywhere. I say...

-Newslaundry.com/ Video Volunteers One man’s efforts to bring back traditional crops and methods of cultivation has ensured land rights and food security for an indigenous tribe. “The forest officials would come and beat us up when we tried to cultivate in our lands. My father died in 1986. They had beaten him and locked him up. He died because of that,” says Bhagwati, who belongs to the Baiga community from Dindori of...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...