Union minister for social justice and empowerment Mukul Wasnik today indicated a huge gap between figures of atrocities provided by the Orissa government and those available with the National Crime Records Bureau. “The state government’s information needs to be furnished afresh,” Wasnik said after a review meeting of the committee constituted to curb offences of untouchability and atrocities against Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) here today. According to the state...

A social audit on the working of the ban on child labour in the domestic and hospitality sectors reveals a sorry state of affairs.  LIKE any normal child, Illyas from Varanasi, a 13-year-old, wanted to go to a regular school and become an important man some day. But poverty forced him to start working at an eatery for Rs.200 a day so that he could feed his younger siblings. He,...

The United Nations labour agency warned in a new study that efforts to eliminate the worst forms of child labour are waning and called for a “re-energized” global campaign to end the scourge. The Global Report on Child Labour, released today, assessed progress made so far and highlighted the challenges that remain if the goal of eliminating the worst forms of child labour by the target date of 2016 is...

The recent high-profile cobalt radiation exposure case in Delhi is a warning signal for bigger disasters waiting to happen. While the reported incident is not commonplace, India is home to a large and rapidly growing inventory of hazardous waste. Much of this is handled by the poor in an extremely crude manner without observing any safety norms. Part of this hazardous waste is even dumped in landfill sites where many...

Is the Indian government bargaining away the rights of millions across the world to essential drugs supplied by India, hailed as the pharmacy of the developing world, in the name of free trade with the European Union (EU)? That's a fear being expressed by civil society groups in the developing world. Commerce minister Anand Sharma vehemently denies such a possibility, claiming that the free trade agreement (FTA) under negotiation with...