A landless labourer dies on Christmas day after going without food for five days. Neither he nor his wife, who was a job card holder under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, knew they could demand work or avail of unemployment benefits as a right It was a death that could have been avoided. Kishen Singh, a 45-year-old landless labourer, died of hunger in Champakheda village in south Rajasthan. What...

The Centre on Tuesday informed the Supreme Court that the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act to provide free and compulsory education to children in the age group of 6 to 14 will be enforced in April/May after the Rules were put in place. Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam gave this assurance before a Bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justice B.S. Chauhan hearing a petition filed by advocate M.C....

Food prices have shot up by more than 20 per cent in the course of the past 12 months. A vast proportion of the nation is being battered by the price rise — the fixed income group, the working classes, landless peasantry and small farmers who have to buy at least a part of the grains they consume from the market. There is, however, no upheaval among the suffering people....

Police will now have to file an FIR on every complaint, the Union home ministry said today, ending the decades-old practice of lodging general diaries that allowed the law-keepers to sit on complaints without investigation. The move is a fallout of the high-profile Ruchika Girhotra molestation case where Haryana police had initially refused to file an FIR (first information report), apparently because the accused was a senior officer. The ministry is expected...

In Amravati villages, dropout is pronounced; alcohol is another problem The wooden door of Surekha Rathod’s house is held together by small strips of coloured ribbons. This is no decoration. Some days ago, Surekha’s drunken father, who was locked out, tried to break in with an axe and sliced off the door. “I had a narrow escape, even though I was inside the house,” says her mother, Sunanda. “My husband...