Makhdumpur is a village in Uttar Pradesh's Bhadohi district. Adjoining it is a cluster of huts inhabited by people of the Nat caste, one of the lowest among Dalits. Congress party general secretary Rahul Gandhi visited a hut in the settlement just before the recent State Assembly elections. He spent some time inside the hut, interacted with the residents, shared a meal with them and then went on his way....

-Rediff.com    In this ongoing series we bring you 30 stories of struggle, survival and success to inspire you. This son of a rickshaw puller, who graduated in Mathematics chose entirely new subjects in Civils because he could not afford coaching. Here is his story On the pot-holed lanes of India's holy city Varanasi, Narayan Jaiswal used to pedal his rickety rickshaw to make a living and send his children to school in nearby...

HETA, India – At the entrance to this village in India’s eastern state of Jharkhand, a large pond glistened under the bright autumn sun. Yellow and blue lilies surrounded it. A tailor was stitching clothes outside his shop while a few boys nearby were playing carrom on the lid of a rusted oil barrel. It was a tranquil, rustic setting – a candidate for a landscape painting, it seemed. But it...

-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...

-The Hindu “Why apply brakes on rickshaws, not on killer cars?” The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Delhi High Court order holding that municipal authorities could not cap the number of licences for cycle rickshaws as putting any such restriction or fixing a ceiling would amount to denial of the people's basic right to earn a livelihood. A Bench of Justice G. S. Singhvi and Justice S. J. Mukhopadhyaya, dismissing an appeal...