-The Hindu Business Line As the Right to Information Act completes 10 years, we examine how RTI has changed people’s lives, become a byword for democracy, and helped alter the relationship between citizen and state Mintu Devi’s relationship with the ration shop changed the day she filed an RTI. In the jhuggis of New Seemapuri, situated on the northeastern edge of Delhi, she is a legend. The 37-year-old mother of four is...

-The Hindu The production of waste in India is growing at an exponential rate. However, the welfare and dignity of the informal workers involved in the stigmatised sector of waste management remains at the bottom of any government’s political agenda. Human society has always produced waste and always will. Waste materials — substances without value — are constantly generated in all production, all distribution and all consumption processes. The time waste spends...

-The New Indian Express BENGALURU: Social discrimination and lack of economic stability force socio-economic minorities to migrate to other villages or cities, Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) chairman Sukhdeo Thorat said on Tuesday. Hence, the state government should ensure social equality in villages, Prof Thorat said while inaugurating a seminar on ‘Distress labour migration within and towards southern Indian states’ organised by the Indian Social Institute. A Labour and Migration...

-The Economic Times The photo accompanying this article was taken in 2013 by Sumitra, an anganwadi worker in Bangalore. It was what the children lovingly called "egg day", one of the three times a week they are served boiled eggs. "Attendance soars on egg days," says Sumitra. When the picture was taken, anganwadis in Karnataka had just started providing eggs following the tragic news of a six-year-old girl in Bangalore who died...

-TheWeekendLeader.com Bhubaneswar: Sabita Sahoo, 35, a migrant labourer, works in a brick kiln unit near Balianta in Khurda district of Odisha. Severe poverty and debt, brought on by landlessness, force her family of five, including her children, to move out of their village in Bolangir district in search of suitable livelihood opportunities. Year after year, Sahoo’s top concern, as always, is about being able to earn enough in order to provide two...