-The Hindu Move to improve post-matric scholarship scheme yet to create immediate impact Over 40 per cent of seats earmarked for Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes in engineering courses have gone unfilled at the end of counselling. There is no surprise element this year as the current figure of vacancy conforms to the trend, going by the data of admission and vacancy since 2009, when a sub-quota of three per cent for Arunthathiyars was created...

-The Hindu One in five women who die during childbirth globally belong to India: WHO Bad roads, poor connectivity and unavailability of transport at night continue to force more than one- third of pregnant women in Jharkhand to deliver at home. “More than 80 per cent of these women who deliver at home are unable to arrange for transport to reach a healthcare facility,” noted a study, conducted by Public Health Foundation of...

-PTI In a bid to end exploitation of tribals, Government on Wednesday said it is formulating a scheme to ensure they get fair and remunerative prices for forest produce and working towards passage of a law on mines and minerals. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also said that the government is considering a "new and effective" law to put an end to the "repulsive practice" of manual scavenging and to provide opportunities to...

To replace ‘Dalit’ with ‘SC’, as the Thorat panel recommends, is to be inaccurate A commission led by S.K. Thorat, and charged with reviewing NCERT political science textbooks in the wake of the cartoon controversy, has singled out a specific word in the text for removal. All instances of the word “Dalit”, it is recommended, should be replaced with “Scheduled Caste” (SC). The blogosphere is rife with speculation on the motivation...

-Live Mint Latest houselisting data demonstrates a visible growth in the material well-being of the two groups Indians, all of them, across class and caste, traded up over the past decade, a period of rapid and record economic growth—that’s the counter-intuitive message in the latest update to Census 2011. According to the so-called houselisting data released by the census, scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) have, like the rest of the country,...