Arundhati has got it all wrong—the facts speak out against her romantic notions of the tribals’ fight Nirad C. Chaudhary wrote in The Continent of Circe that India’s tribals were mainly found in hill forests. This was because, he reasoned, they had been chased there by the invading Aryans, who displaced them from their river plains. In an essay published in this magazine (Capitalism: A Ghost Story, March 26), Arundhati Roy...

-The Deccan Chronicle Kerala’s 100 per cent literacy myth has been busted. About 2.2 lakh people belonging to the scheduled castes in the state are illiterate, it has been revealed. This comes up to 9.5 per cent of the Dalit population. The figures were part of one of the main findings in the provisional data prepared by the Kerala Institute of Local Administration as part of a study on scheduled caste habitat and...

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought from the Centre the files on 18 mercy petitions, including that of the Parliament attack case convict Afzal Guru who is on death row, pending consideration before the President for periods ranging from one to seven years. A Bench of Justices G. S. Singhvi and S. J. Mukhopadhaya called for the records from Additional Solicitor-General Harin Raval after amicus curiae Ram Jethmalani and senior counsel...

Ashish Bose is a veteran demographer whose expertise in analysing population data persuaded the former Prime Minister, the late Rajiv Gandhi to make him an advisor on issues ranging from urbanisation to poverty alleviation. He is best known for coining the term Bimaru (shorthand for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) for states with the worst socio-economic indicators. An author of 24 books, he is now working on a...

Says respond else face action Annoyed by the non-submission of reports regarding illegal clinical trials of breast cancer drug, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued notices to the Union health ministry and the Andhra Pradesh government. It has asked the Centre and the state government to respond within six weeks or face action. The commission had in June last year sent notices to the Union health secretary, secretary of the...