Last week, an enterprising resident welfare association in Ghaziabad organised a registration camp for unique identification (UID) numbers. It found people queuing up till midnight for a week with infants, grandmothers and some with domestic workers in tow. No one had a clue as to how UID was different from the several other identity documents each of them had been scrupulously accumulating and treasuring. They were initially informed that all they...

-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,"...

Many in India feel betrayed that neoliberal economic policies have not ended but increased fraud and corruption Corruption is not exactly new in India. Quite apart from the extensive historical evidence of its spread, during and after the "mixed economy" period of state planning, the "licence-permit raj" was regularly accused by commentators of breeding graft, constraining economic activity and forcing citizens to be at the mercy of corrupt officialdom at all...

It was the writer and activist Arundhati Roy who set foreign journalists in India busily chattering recently. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, Ms Roy was discussing the Maoist and Adavasi “resistance” to encroachment on tribal lands. Mr Moss, asked her why, “we in the West don’t hear about these mini-wars?”. Ms Roy replied: “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that...

-The Hindu   Amid the intensifying protests against land acquisition by South Korean company Posco in Jagatsinghpur, Orissa, the resistance got some praise during a debate on “The Posco Betrayal”, which was held here on Sunday. Sharing his experiences of being part of the Independent Investigation Committee that reviewed POSCO clearances, general secretary of the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) V. Suresh criticised the Orissa Government, Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh...