-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Twenty-three bridges and tunnels on national highways (NHs) are over 100 years old, of which 17 require rehabilitation or major maintenance. As many as 123 other bridges in the country require immediate attention and 6,000 are structurally "distressed". These are some of the findings of a analysis conducted by the Union road transport and highways ministry under its Indian Bridge Management System (IBMS) project, India's first-ever...

-The Indian Express Out of all those engaged in manually removing human excreta, 95 per cent are women. While men are paid in cash, women are mostly paid in kind. Meerut And New Delhi: “I started my work as a manual scavenger after my marriage,” says Premi, as she dabs her tears with her faded yellow cotton dupatta. She’s known as ‘Budhiya’ (an old woman) in the Radhna Inayatpur village in Mawana...

-Firstpost.com After Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh has now been rocked by farmer unrest. At least six farmers were killed and eight others were critically injured on Tuesday when the police resorted to firing to subdue the protesting farmers in Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh. In both Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, the farmers’ demands are almost similar: they want complete farm loan waiver as a short-term palliative and secondly, institutionalised mechanism for getting better prices...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Activists from across the country have urged the President to stop the submergence of 192 villages in the Narmada Valley in Madhya Pradesh for the Sardar Sarovar dam till the state government compensates and rehabilitates the 40,000 families that will be affected. Some of them met President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday evening under the banner of the National Alliance for People's Movements (NAPM) and submitted a memorandum along...