-The Times of India Thanks to online courses and the initiatives of a few individuals, youngsters from underprivileged backgrounds are learning to crack the code. In 2014, Akash Nautiyal was robbed - he lost everything money, laptop, books, clothes, and since he didn't have cash to get to the call centre he worked at, he lost his job. His landlord evicted him, and Nautiyal, then 17, took up a job as a...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Almost a quarter of India’s 370,000 beggars are Muslims, newly released data from the 2011 Census show, reinforcing that the community still lags behind on most counts despite the country’s rapid economic growth. Muslims, the largest minority who make up 14.2% of India’s 1.25-billion population, come out pretty much at the bottom of most socio-economic indices, even a decade after a high-level government probe into their historical disadvantages...

-The Hindu A total of 241 persons out of the 385 death row inmates in India are first time offenders, new findings contained in the “Death Penalty India Report” released on Friday said. For the study, 373 of all the 385 death row inmates in India were interviewed from July 2013 to January 2015 by the Center of Death Penalty at National Law University, Delhi. The study found that around 60 per...

-The Hindu Business Line The best way to celebrate Ambedkar As we celebrate BR Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary, it is important to remember that his vision of economic equality for dalits is still a distant dream. He had told the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949: “We are entering an era of political equality. But economically and socially we remain a deeply unequal society. Unless we resolve this contradiction, inequality will destroy...

-Outlook Vigorous action can nullify the reasons that conspire to keep Dalits out of newsrooms In the ’50s, a foreign correspondent wrote to a renowned south Indian English daily, seeking comments on alleged discrimination against non-Brahmin journalists on its staff. Discrimination was out of the question, the paper clarified, as it never hired a non-Brahmin!  Over  60 years later, the media landscape has altered but the Indian newsroom is still the sanctuary...