Jatav residents of Ramgarh in U.P. resist attempts by members of a powerful community to grab their land by violent means. IN what could be considered one of the worst incidents of vendetta against Dalits in the National Capital Region (NCR), members of the Dalit Jatav community were beaten up brutally by some members of the dominant Gujjar community in Ramgarh village in the Greater Noida area of Uttar Pradesh...

Religious and social groups have trampled on the freedom of expression of artists and scholars to serve their own agendas. “FOR all the big talk about India's great tradition of cultural and religious tolerance, many forces in the social life of our country and a number of established organisations, including the so-called non-political ones, have time and again resorted to blatant suppression of freedom of expression, pointing forcefully to the...

-The Financial Express Lots of work ahead to make RTE work The reasons behind the poor performance of schools students in India are slowly being whittled down from a whole range of reasons (low attendance, high drop-out rate, lack of teachers, lack of adequate number of schools, etc) to just a few key areas that need a lot of work. The most pressing need seems to be the paucity of trained and...

While India faces an acute shortage of trained medical manpower, as many as 1,333 doctors migrated to foreign shores over the last one year. During the same period, the previous year - from April 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011 - 1,157 doctors had migrated in search of employment, and between 2009 and 2010, 1,458 doctors went abroad. This latest revelation by Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Friday comes just...

-The Economist HOW should one judge the lot of women in India, a country that is in many ways progressive, modern, tolerant and yet by turns repressive and hostile? Women hold the highest political positions (the presidency, speaker of parliament, leader of the ruling party, leader of the opposition in parliament, several chief ministers of large states) and in theory they are protected by a variety laws promoting equality. Though development indicators...