KEY TRENDS   • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8   • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...

-The Times of India The CPI (Maoist) has formed its own elite training 'institute' in the Dandakaranya forests, a Naxalite bastion, to transform tribal cadres into Communist professionals equipped to handle tasks related to the Central Committee, the outfit's apex decision-making body. The Buniyadi Communist Training School (BCTS), a brainchild of CPI (Maoist) top gun Ganapathy, has been churning out professionally-trained Communists since 2009 with basic military skills and knowledge of Hindi,...

-Down to Earth They turn a blind eye to laws overriding tribal rights, complains national commission GOVERNORS of states with sizeable tribal population have come in for indictment over not performing their special administrative roles. To ensure partial autonomy in tribal areas, the Constitution entrusts governors with immense powers to supervise the administration and governance in such areas. They can allow or disallow any law or development programme in tribal areas to...

-The Hindu A proposed legislation to make the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) a statutory body, the draft of which is in circulation among the States for comments, has made Education Department officials of States apprehensive. They fear that it will result in hundreds of elite schools affiliated to the Board going completely beyond their monitoring mechanism. While the rules of the Right to Education (RTE) Act give an important role...

-The Hindu New, more fair and transparent norms for iron ore mining are now being put in place in many States Hit by debilitating mining curbs (including an outright ban in some States) and a clampdown on exports through high duties, India’s iron ore industry today is a pale shadow of what it was for much of the last decade, despite some recent forward movement on restarting iron ore mining in Karnataka,...