-The Hindu Sixteen Indians died in road accidents every hour in 2014, a quarter of them on two-wheelers, and a majority of them as a result of overspeeding or reckless overtaking, new official data show. Tamil Nadu, and Chennai in particular, have high levels of road fatalities. The National Crime Records Bureau’s Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India report for 2014 was released late on Friday. The numbers show a slight increase...

-Hindustan Times On World Population Day today, the ministry of health and family welfare should be congratulated for committing to enlarge the scope of contraceptive choices to rejuvenate the family planning programme in the country. This move fulfils the long awaited need for expanding the basket of choice in the public healthcare system. To deliver quality family planning services in a spirit of voluntarism and within a rights and accountability framework, the...

-TheWire.in   The newly released UNESCO e-atlas on out-of-school children (OOSC) provides worrying evidence not only of the low priority being accorded to basic education across developing countries, but also by the developed world in terms of the aid given to education. As many as 124 million children and adolescents worldwide are out of school, 17.7 million – or 14 per cent – of whom are Indian. The rise in the number...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Nine-year-old Priyanka Kumari wants to escape her impoverished childhood but the school she studies in is most unusual – underneath a metro bridge in east Delhi’s Shakarpur area. The pillars serve as the boundary of the school and trains roar past on the bridge above, rattling her as she solves elementary mathematical problems. “The teaching here is good, I like coming to this school. Sir gives work to do...

Samata started working in a small tribal hamlet in 1987 with a group of tribal and rural youth, to mobilize tribal communities against exploitation by outsiders and by government. Samata was formally registered as a non government organization in 1990. Samata operates across a broad spectrum of action, from organizing grassroots campaigns in the communities of north coastal Andhra Pradesh to creating international support networks of human rights and indigenous...