For the first time, SHO also identified as one of the alleged perpetrators of crime The trial in the case was shifted to the Rohini Sessions Court last December ‘Families of the accused are threatening witnesses with dire consequences' Kamla, whose physically challenged daughter and husband were killed in the Mirchpur caste violence case in which 18 Dalit houses were also burnt in April last year, has identified 81 of the 98 accused...

A bill drafted by the National Advisory Council to check communal violence seeks to impose greater accountability on public officials in tackling violence or discrimination against vulnerable groups. The council, headed by Sonia Gandhi, today took up the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, prepared by one of its working groups. The council has decided to put the draft bill in the public domain to invite...

Gram Sabhas given equal say in Forest Rights Act Bamboo had been declared minor forest produce recently Transit passes to allow villagers to use, sell bamboo within the community “Today, bamboo is liberated,” proclaimed Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh at a function here on Wednesday, where he handed over to Mendha's community leader Devaji Tofa a transit pass that would allow the sale and transportation of bamboo within...

Power comes through the barrel of a gun, Mao Zedong said. For Lekha-Mendha, though, such power seems rooted in bamboo. The village in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli today became the first in India to win the right to grow, harvest and sell bamboo, a key goal of a five-year-old central law which aims to give tribal communities control over some resources of the jungles they live in. “This is a historic day. Bamboo has...

The first results of Census 2011 put India's population at 1,210 million, indicating a demographic transition. CENSUS 2011 is the 15th one undertaken in India since 1872 and the seventh after the country attained Independence. While there have been stray historical references to population counts of one kind or another in earlier periods over much smaller territories within the territory that constitutes present-day India, the consensus view is that the...