Taking a serious view of 150 Dalit families from Mirchpur village in Haryana's Hisar district being forced to leave the village after two of them were killed allegedly by the dominant Jat community, the Supreme Court on Monday issued a stern notice to the Haryana Government for its response to a petition highlighting their plight. Mirchpur, about 150 km from Delhi, is a large village comprising about 1,700 Jat (dominant caste)...

Nine of 10 mud-eating children are in the last stage of malnutrition. Eight of 10 people are deprived of every national social-security net and live with starvation and hunger. The average life span is 40 In April, the Hindustan Times revealed acute deprivation in the Uttar Pradesh village of Ganne, part of the former constituency of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.   Now, a Supreme Court inquiry team that visited the area...

Union minister for social justice and empowerment Mukul Wasnik today indicated a huge gap between figures of atrocities provided by the Orissa government and those available with the National Crime Records Bureau. “The state government’s information needs to be furnished afresh,” Wasnik said after a review meeting of the committee constituted to curb offences of untouchability and atrocities against scheduled castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) here today. According to the state...

The PPP model proposed in the Eleventh Plan provides for no government or social control over education. It will lead to the privatisation and commercialisation of education using public funds.  Public-private partnership (PPP) has become a fashionable slogan in new development strategies, particularly over the last couple of decades. It is projected as an innovative idea to tap private resources and to encourage the active participation of the private sector...

Biodiversity drives sustainable and climate-resilient farming and the biotechnology industry. Everything should be done to spread bio-literacy for an era of bio-happiness in rural and urban India through the conversion of bio-resources into jobs and income.  Biodiversity provides building blocks for sustainable food, health and livelihood security systems. It is the feedstock for the biotechnology industry and a climate-resilient farming system. Given its importance, a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)...