-The Telegraph New Delhi: Indian lawmakers who win closely fought elections often pay off their local political debts by engineering the award of village road-building jobs to contractors from their caste, a US-French study has found. It has added that these roads have a higher probability of never being built. The two major findings by Jacob N. Shapiro from Princeton University and Jonathan Lehne and Oliver Vanden Eynde from the Paris School of...

-Hindustan Times Gyan Chandra, 45, of Bhauri village in Sitapur had taken a loan of Rs 5 lakh from a finance firm in 2015 to purchase a tractor. Loan recovery agents allegedly crushed a Dalit farmer under a tractor in Sitapur on Saturday when he failed to deposit an arrear of the loan he had taken from a finance company, police quoted the victim’s brother as saying. Assistant superintendent of police (ASP), Sitapur,...

-The Hindu Hundreds of government schools, especially in tribal-dominated districts, have been shut down over the past year. Elizabeth Kuruvilla reports on the closures, the mushrooming of private schools, and the battles waged by tribal villages to keep state-funded local schools open It’s a little past four in the afternoon, the time when schools ring their closing bells in the Hatsesikhal cluster of Odisha’s tribal-dominated Rayagada district. Just before Sekhal Primary School...

-ThePrint.in IGP Mamta Singh says since most rapists are known to victims, the problem seems to be that women and their families have ‘too much faith’ in men around them. Chandigarh: Haryana has witnessed nine cases of rape in the past one week alone, raising serious questions about the competence of the police, their sensitivity to such crimes and the larger issue of the increased targeting of women in a state known...

-PTI New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday termed as ”absolutely illegal” any attack by khap panchayats or associations against an adult man and woman opting for inter- caste marriage. The apex court said if an adult man and woman marry, no khap, panchayat, individual or society can question them. A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud asked the Centre to give its reponse on suggestions...