Police officers of Chhattisgarh would have us believe that people fall inside bathrooms at police stations deliberately to break their own heads or backs and later blame it on custodial torture. They say that’s what happened with Soni Sori, an ashramshala teacher from Jabeli village in the Maoist-affected Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, on October 10. In pain, drifting in and out of consciousness, benumbed by the ‘good cop, bad cop’...

Management agrees to set up two panels at Manesar plant The 14-day-long strike by workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited's Manesar plant in which workers of Suzuki Powertrain India Limited and Suzuki Motorcycle India Private Limited joined, was called off in the early hours of Friday after the managements, the workers and the Haryana government arrived at separate tripartite agreements. Unrest had been festering at the Manesar plant since June, hampering car...

-PTI The 14-day-long strike at Maruti Suzuki India’s Manesar’s plant has been called off this morning following a tripartite agreement between the management, workers and the Haryana Government. As part of the agreement, the management has agreed to take back 64 permanent workers but another 30 will remain suspended. It has also been agreed that around 1,200 casual workers would also be reinstated, sources close to the talks said. Setting up of two...

Centre delinks access to welfare schemes from poverty line NUMBER of people who can benefit from government’s welfare programmes is going to swell. Currently, the Central government caps the entitlements under most welfare programmes to those below the poverty line, which is as low as Rs 12/day/person for rural areas and Rs 18/day/person for urban areas. State governments have been opposing this mechanism. In future, the ongoing socio-economic and caste census...

In the brown smog that covers Manesar this late autumn, large trucks that pack half-a-dozen cars each into their containers queue on the broken highway from Delhi to Jaipur and park any which way they can. Their drivers loll in the teashops and dhabas. Few know when their containers will be loaded with Maruti Suzuki’s deliverables: cars named Swift and Dzire and A-Star and Sx4 that have been booked by tens...