-Express India Lucknow: An RTI activist, who was also the headmaster in a government primary school, was shot dead by unidentified men in MoHAmmadabad police station area of Farrukhabad district on Thursday. The victim, Anand Prakash Rajput (42), had used RTI to get information which he used to get three teachers dismissed from service for getting jobs on the basis of forged documents and the process of dismissal of three other teachers...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the Centre to convene a meeting of chief secretaries of all States and Union Territories in six weeks for evolving a consensus in regard to the regulation of sale of acid in the States/Union Territories to prevent acid attacks. A three-Judge bench of Justices R.M. Lodha, J. Chelameswar and Madan B. Lokur gave this direction to the Additional Solicitor General MoHAn Parasaran who submitted...

-Counterpunch.org     “The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class.”     BR Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah, 1943, Delhi. I. Arrest. States are clumsy with their enormous power. When it suits the modern state, it uses it immense apparatus to constraint those who make claims upon it or who say things that denigrate this or that section of society. A college professor in West Bengal draws a cartoon of...

-The Times of India Sociologist Ashis Nandy's controversial words at the Jaipur lit fest are being debated heatedly but there is one thing that is difficult to argue with: there is a lack of representation from the backward classes and tribals in the upper echelons of power in West Bengal. Over the last 100 years, he said, "nobody from the other backward classes (OBCs), the backward classes, the scheduled castes and...

-Outlook The sorts of corruption that matter are a purview of privileged     “An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity, or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.”     —B.R....