-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...

-Livemint.com Every time she felt her bladder was full, 12-year-old Madhuri Kumari left her classroom and ran to her nearby home to use the toilet. At her government-run school in Sangam Vihar, South Delhi, this was the norm for many students for years. The primary school with 1,300 boys and an equal number of girls had neither a toilet nor a drinking water facility. What was more embarrassing for the girl than...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Indian weaver is dismissed in high places as an embarrassing anachronism, despite demand for his or her skills and products. In the new millennium, globalisation and a mindless acquiescence to imported notions of a good life threaten to take over, even as the West looks East for better concepts of sustainable living. Analysing today's crisis in the handloom sector, plagued by low-cost imitations from power looms,...

-The Hindu The battle over the Narmada dam reflects a journey, a pilgrimage, and a recollection of 30 years of resistance. Numbers alone cannot make sense of it because it demands a different kind of storytelling If you were to ask a middle class person today what the most significant act of history in the India of the last 20 years is, most would say this — the rise of Narendra Modi....

-The Telegraph   The debate around Yakub Memon’s hanging highlights the many cases of people who were hanged but who should have lived. Indeed, the Supreme Court admitted in 2009 that it had wrongly sentenced 15 people to death in 15 years. Avijit Chatterjee looks at some cases   It was a mistake, the Supreme Court later said. But by then it was too late. Ravji Rao, or Ram Chandra, had been hanged to...