-Outlook Union Home Ministry, the nerve centre of country's internal security today Witnessed a protest by over 200 contractual employees outside the office of a senior official over non-payment of dues. As many as 204 employees stood outside the office of Joint Secretary (Administration) Bhagwan Shankar inside the ministry in support of their demand for release of wages. The Home Ministry had hired the services of a private manpower firm -- Xecute...

KEY TRENDS   • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8   • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...

-The Indian Express On Monday, the Bengali new year's day, viewers who tuned into Bengali music channel Tara Muzik Witnessed a spectacle never seen before on Indian TV. Anchors of the channel and independent artistes called in to present Barsha Baran, a programme to celebrate the new year 1420, wept copiously on camera while announcing that the channel, facing an unprecedented "crisis of survival", was shutting down. Hundreds of viewers commiserated with...

The ongoing droughts and water crises in Maharashtra and Gujarat point to the multiple conflicts the beleaguered and scarce resource of water is likely to spark in the coming years. India is today the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, but it is clear that how we extract, harvest, distribute and manage our most precious resource cannot proceed along usual lines. The unsustainable over-extraction is heralding a fall in the water-table and...

-The Hindu The dark cloud of 1984 still hangs low over senior Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, but despite a judicial inquiry's findings against him in 2005, no credible prosecution of the former minister has been launched to date for his alleged role in instigating the anti-Sikh massacres that took the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent persons in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The Central Bureau of Investigation...