The Centre’s sunshine law — scheduled tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, — has failed to find favour in Khunti district, the birthplace of tribal icon Birsa Munda. Villagers in the district said the new act is irrelevant as the Chotanagpur Tenancy (CNT) Act, 1908, framed by the British following the Birsa movement, ensures more rights to the tribals than what the new law promises. Little...

The Centre plans to open over 1,000 residential schools for girls in backward and remote areas as part of its plan to universalise education. The National Sample Survey has found out that over 81 lakh children aged 6 to 13 years remain out of school and that most of them are girls. The human resource development ministry has told the finance ministry it wants to set up 1,073 new Kasturba Gandhi Balika...

The implementation of the scheduled tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 has created controversy in West Bengal. The gram sabha, the basic unit in the process of forest rights recognition, has been replaced by the gram sansad, denoting the village level constituency under the panchayati raj system. This has been followed by contiguous arrangements as well as initiatives which are inconsistent with the Act....

Jharkhand’s implementation of the Centre’s flagship scheme to grant land rights to forest dwellers has been extremely poor, ringing hollow promises by successive governments to uphold rights of over three lakh tribals of the state. According to a report prepared by a 19-member committee constituted by the Union ministry of environment and forests, 24 districts of Jharkhand had granted land rights to a mere 7,207 forest dwellers under scheduled tribes and...

Muslims' enrolment at secondary level of education is less than that of the scheduled castes, a government survey has indicated. Giving this information in Rajya Sabha in a written reply, Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said that the report of 64th Round (2007-08) of National Sample Survey (NSS) indicates that Muslims' enrolment at secondary level is 10.2 per cent of the total enrolments. The survey said that the same for the scheduled...