Three pronouncements made on three consecutive days this month by the Supreme Court of India have brought relief to different groups of economically and socially deprived people. The beneficiaries include children sold out by poor parents to work in circuses as child labour; young men and women determined to get married crossing caste barriers and harassed for that very reason by ‘khap panchayats'; and the hungry poor across the country...

WHILE maintaining her support for a Lokpal institution, Aruna Roy, a prominent civil rights activist and a member of the National Advisory Council, took a critical position in respect of the Jan Lokpal Bill drafted by the activists of the India Against Corruption campaign. A recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 2000, she heads the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (a trade union of workers and peasants)...

Jury issues recommendations to State on developing safety and health policies for schools NCPCR to conduct investigation into accident in school; school asked to maintain records In addition to instances of gross violation of the provisions of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, like fee/fund collection and corporal punishment, a large number of complaints lodged with the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) pertain to...

The law ministry has prepared a 10-point governance reforms agenda which envisages capping a bureaucrat's term to 20 years and seeks reforms in allocation of mining and land rights. The presentation made to key UPA functionaries, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi , says all new recruitments to central government jobs should be for 20 years and any extension beyond that would depend on the outcome of...

A decline of 2.6 million in elementary education enrolments from 2007 to 2010, the years of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan's trumpeted success, needs careful analysis. Enrolment data, based on school statistics, deals with the supply-side only. Census or NSS data , based on household information, gives us the demand-side of school enrolments. The two should roughly match, as they do in half of India, but not for UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,...