-The Hindustan Times   Do these people look well-off to you? The planning commission puts them above poverty line. Basant Kumar, 51  Shopkeeper  Kusumpur Pahari slum,  Vasant Vihar, Delhi Daily expense: Rs 53   Basant Kumar runs a little shop in a slum in Vasant Vihar, home to over two lakh migrant families. He feeds and clothes his wife and three children on his meagre earnings of Rs5,000 a month. He also works odd-jobs, in construction or with...

Of late, there has been a debate on whether public programmes such as school education, scholarships, health-care delivery and access to microcredit can be targeted at beneficiaries based on religion; some consider this ‘unconstitutional' and argue that it amounts to discrimination. I highlight the constitutional provisions and argue that there is nothing in the Constitution which bars identification of beneficiaries based on religion. Religious identity is listed on a par...

-The Indian Express   Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Tuesday termed the suggestion to deny privileges to those families in Kerala who do not follow the two-child norm as “ridiculous”, saying the states cannot provide benefits on the basis of the number of children that a family has. “It (the recommendation) is not being implemented anywhere. Anybody can say anything but the state will not provide on the basis of the...

Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi sold off his business in 2003 to do something relevant. The Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai alumnus soon became a prolific user of the Right To Information Act and filed more than 800 RTI applications. He was appointed the Information Commissioner at the Central Information Commission, New Delhi, in 2008. In this freewheeling interview with rediff.com's Priyanka, Gandhi says that appellants must understand that law describes 'information' as something...

A band of tribal women from rebel-hit Jehan village, 125km from the state capital, are keeping their men off liquor since the past one-and-half years. An unlikely crusader leads rural homemakers, numbering about 60, under the self-named outfit Nehru Mahila Samiti. She’s a 29-year-old primary schoolteacher, Basanti Tirkey, a Ranchi’s Nirmala College alumnus from the batch of 2004. The mother of a three-year-old son, her husband Antonis Lakra works in the...