-The Hindu     Deep-rooted caste biases and the brazen disregard by civic authorities of court judgments are the main reason for the frequent deaths of sewerage workers across the country Earlier this month, a group of men set forth to unblock a drain sewer in the basement of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in Delhi. Two of the men, Ashok and Chhotu, entered the sewer but did not return....

-IANS DEHRADUN/ HARIDWAR: There was still no clarity over the number of deaths in the flood-ravaged Uttarakhand, with a state minister on Sunday not ruling out an "estimate" of 10,000-plus and chief minister Vijay Bahuguna putting the number of missing people at 3,000. Uttarakhand health minister Surinder Singh Negi did not discount assembly speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal's claim on Saturday of the toll in the tragedy having crossed 10,000. "He (Kunjwal) has given...

-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...

-The Hindu Switching to renewable energy sources in the country's midday meal programme will save millions of rupees. But only a few kitchens are doing anything about it, says the author. This is a story of facts and figures and sheer size. Of an auditorium-sized room dense with hot steam from cooking. Of seven tonnes of cooked rice and four tanker-loads of steaming sambar that needed 70 pairs of hands for cutting...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...