-Tehelka Shamefully, in India, a large percentage of the population still defecates in the open. However, a village in Tamil Nadu has scripted a rare success story by becoming an Open Defecation-Free Village. Nisha Ponthathil documents how the people of Amarambedu near Chennai triumphed over habit with a little help from the civil society Twenty-nine-year-old R Karthick, a resident of Amarambedu village, situated about 65 kilometres away from Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai,...

-The Hindu The supporting props offered for the striking down of Section 66A diminish the arrogance of government and reinstate the ‘genuine' rule of law. Reading the judgment, one is tempted to ask this question: Is it a landmark judgment or just a great one? To appreciate the difference between "great" and "landmark", it is necessary to begin with some very fine distinctions. A great judgment is one that restores the constitutional...

-NDTV Lucknow: 30-year-old Asma Khatoon lives in a slum in Lucknow and has never been able to benefit from the country's massive Public Distribution System. Asma's attempts to get a ration card made never materialised as she did not have an address proof for her temporary shack. "I have paid money to get an ID card, Aadhar card but nothing has come. Somebody says go to the local representative, who says go...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The Centre has decided to extend its flagship rural jobs scheme to include afforestation as part of a move to create more durable assets through the programme that Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently derided as a living monument to the previous UPA government's failures and promised to overhaul. Officials said the National Mission for a Green India (GIM) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-The Hindu Business Line Though migration of labour from the east has helped revive the plantations in southern India, questions remain on the long-term implications, Vishwanath Kulkarni reports As the harvest season starts in Coorg, Karnataka, coffee planter MC Kariappa has a lot of issues to contend with - productivity, weather and, the biggest worry of all in recent times, paucity of labourers. So when a dozen labourers from Assam landed at...