-The Times of India BHUBANESWAR: With lakhs of people hit by floods in the wake of cyclone Phailin, Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik on Wednesday sought immediate release of Rs 1,523 crore from the Centre for relief and rehabilitation. "I request the Centre to release an advance of Rs 1,000 crore over and above the corpus of Rs 523 crore available in the State Disaster Response Fund for the year 2013-14," Naveen...

-The Hindu Victims allegedly suffered deprivation and torture at the work place Erode: Forty-seven young labourers, including 24 from Chhattisgarh and 12 from Assam, most of them girls, were rescued from bondage in P.V. Spinning Mill at Vinnapalli village near Sathyamangalam in Erode district by a team of officials on Monday night. The remaining 11 workers are all girls belonging to various parts of Tamil Nadu. Twenty of the youngsters from Chhattisgarh and...

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...

-The Times of India Put 50% cap on all reservations Affirmative action can work only in limited doses. It should not be used as a sledgehammer that rules out all other criteria of job selection. The 50% cap on reservations mandated by the Supreme Court earlier should be the absolute upper limit for all categories of reservations. Any relaxation of this upper limit would further dilute meritocracy in public services, impede good...

-The Hindu More needs to be done to enforce the law banning manual scavenging. This monsoon, India's Parliament passed a law of enormous social significance prohibiting and punishing manual scavenging, which remains the most degrading form of untouchability and caste discrimination in the country. This is not the first time this practice was outlawed: untouchability and forced labour were forbidden in the Constitution itself and, in 1993, a law was first passed...