In Maharashtra, attacks on citizen-activists have increased with the greater use of RTI; four activists have been killed in the last seven months IN the late 1970s, a woman named Shobha Shirodkar was the victim of a hit-and-run in Mumbai. It was no accident. It was a case of murder because Shobha, who was the principal of a prestigious school in the city, had opposed the land mafia and was believed...

Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

The NREGS is restricted. The PDS is targeted. Only exploitation is universal. The rotting of lakhs of tonnes of foodgrain in open yards, while shocking, is hardly new or surprising. Remember the rural poor marching on godowns in Andhra Pradesh in 2001 in similar circumstances? The Supreme Court was quite right in jolting the Union government. “In a country where admittedly people are starving, it is a crime to waste even...

It is potentially a game-changer so far as rules of media reporting are concerned. The Supreme Court on Monday virtually slapped a ban on source-based news stories in matters under investigation, in an order which can alter the journalism landscape. The provocation for the severe order, already being seen as a gag order, was violation of the apex court's two-year-old ruling asking newspapers and TV channels to exercise restraint in...

Even as the government plans to bring legislation that will define and punish perpetrators of honour killings, a study said most violent reactions appeared to be prompted when a girl chose to marry a boy from a lower caste than herself. The study commissioned by the National Commission for Women (NCW) and conducted by NGO `Shakti Vahini' profiled 560 cases which reflected that honour killing was a north Indian phenomenon,...