-The Telegraph New Delhi: Militant guns routinely draw blood here. Ceasefires have been called and aborted. But the troubled Northeast is still the safest for two vulnerable sections - women and children. So says the National Crime Records Bureau in its report for the year 2014. Women, according to the report, are far more safe here than they are in, say, Bengal or Uttar Pradesh. Except Assam, which contributed to more than five per...

-PTI Claiming flaws in the process of identifying beneficiaries of welfare schemes based on the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) data, a group of parliamentarians, intellectuals and socials Activists today appealed to the Centre to take corrective measures to provide benefits to the deserving lot. In a memorandum submitted to Union Rural Development Minister Birender Singh, the members picked flaws in the process of identifying welfare schemes beneficiaries. "The clearly stated aim...

-The Hindu A recent sting video shows the men acquitted in the Laxmanpur Bathe case boasting about the same massacre. Will the passing of the Prevention of Atrocities (Amendment) Bill finally change the way justice is delivered to Dalits? On the night of December 1, 1997, in Laxmanpur Bathe, a village in Bihar’s Arwal district 90 km from Patna, 58 Dalits were slaughtered by a gang of dominant caste men that went...

-Economic and Political Weekly While insufficient sanitation facilities often get represented in statistics and are reported in the literature on urban infrastructure planning and contested urban spaces, what is often left out is the everyday practice and experience of going to dysfunctional toilets, particularly by women. By analysing the practices and problems associated with toilet use from a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to situate the issue in the everyday lives...

-Livemint.com BJP’s U-turn on the proposed land Act reflects a re-balancing of deeper political forces that are at work in India’s political economy The recent U-turn by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government on the proposed amendment to the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (henceforth the land Act), can be viewed narrowly as a Congress victory in the ongoing tit-for-tat game that is short-changing...