-The Indian Express The labour contractor demanded Rs 1.4 lakh for the 10 people who were paid in advance but slipped away. Bhubaneswar: Nilambar Dhangdamajhi, a 22-year-old tribal farmer from Kalahandi district, whose right palm was chopped off by a labour contractor in December 2013, died last evening. Dhangdamajhi, suffering from an unknown fever for last few days, passed away at his home in Nuaguda village of Kalahandi’s Jaipatna block. His wife...

-PTI Muslims have the highest number of illiterates — nearly 43 percent of their population — while Jains have the highest number of literates among India’s religious communities with over 86 percent of them educated. According to the Census 2011 data, Jains have just 13.57 percent illiterates aged seven and above among all communities. The census has taken those between 0 and 6 years as illiterate. Muslims have the highest percentage of illiterates aged...

-The Times of India The Muslim community in India has the lowest share of graduates compared with other communities and just half the share of the nationwide average of under 6%. The Jains continue to be the most educationally advanced community with over a quarter of its members qualified as graduate or above. The share of technical diploma holders is the highest among CHRIstians at 2.2%, again continuing a previous trend,...

-The Hindu As of July 2016, 33,091 NGOs were registered under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, which regulates foreign funding to these bodies. A total of 3,068 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) received foreign funding above Rs. 22,000 crore in 2014-15, according to government data presented in response to a question in Parliament. These are NGOs who reported receiving more than Rs. 1 crore from foreign donors. This amount was 83.3 per cent (nearly double)...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Almost a quarter of India’s 370,000 beggars are Muslims, newly released data from the 2011 Census show, reinforcing that the community still lags behind on most counts despite the country’s rapid economic growth. Muslims, the largest minority who make up 14.2% of India’s 1.25-billion population, come out pretty much at the bottom of most socio-economic indices, even a decade after a high-level government probe into their historical disadvantages...