-Down to Earth The true potential of the Fifth Schedule was diluted right at its conception Incontrovertibly, the object of creating the Fifth Schedule was to make a special instrument for the welfare and advancement of the Scheduled Tribes. It was formulated for the implementation of the Directive Principle that the State shall promote with special care the educational and economic interests of ...... the Schedules Tribes, and shall protect them from...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A Constitution bench has ruled that the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are entitled to affirmative action in promotions, quashing a 1997 government memo that withdrew the benefit. Friday's verdict by the five-judge Supreme Court bench does not necessarily mean that the Centre and state governments - to which the judgment applies equally - are bound to offer benefits in promotion to all Dalit and tribal employees from...

-The Hindu   The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...

India has witnessed many fiery debates on poverty estimates. Equally contentious has been the issue of inequality. Now a new report on exclusion offers a fresh perspective on poverty, inequality and social justice. (See below a summary of the report) Based on data and knowledge resources available in the public domain, India Exclusion Report 2013-14 highlights the systematic discrimination faced by women, Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Muslims, persons with...

-The Times of India   The scheduled tribes in India have traditionally had the highest sex ratios - the number of women for every 1,000 men - among all communities. But, detailed data on individual tribal communities just put out by the census shows that the situation is worsening in almost each case. And the sex ratio in the population aged zero to six is significantly lower. In 2011, India's ST population as...