-The Times of India It was a rainy July evening ten years ago. A motley group of villagers from Sutia gathered at the local market to protest the spate of rapes that had left the area terrorized. They were angry but terrified of reprisal. And they did not know if anyone would join the fight. Speaking in hushed tones, they distributed leaflets asking people to join the protest. Some took the...

-The Hindu Asara leaders say the media has not reported all decisions such as ban on dowry & compulsory schooling The leaders of the Samaj Sudhar Sabha in Asara village here, who recently ordered women to stop using mobile phones, have claimed that they had never imposed any “blanket ban” and only restrained them from using mobile phones while stepping out of their homes. However, the Sabha members did not backtrack on...

-The Telegraph A panel that approved NCERT textbooks in 2006 has expressed “dissatisfaction” at a review committee report suggesting 21 controversial cartoons should be deleted. The national monitoring committee (NMC), co-chaired by academics such as Mrinal Miri and G.P. Deshpande, had approved all new school textbooks in 2006. But a few cartoons in some political science textbooks had drawn criticism from politicians. The NCERT had then set up a committee under the Indian...

-The Hindu The debate over the cartoons used in NCERT textbooks as aids to learning have thrown up a range of issues. The discussion has crystallised around a set of oppositions: motivated political correctness of our elected representatives vs. the necessity of preemptory parliamentary intervention on educational material appropriate for schools; institutional autonomy vs. political responsibility of a state presiding over a diverse and fraught society; the hubris of ‘experts’ vs....

-The Times of India DANTEWADA: Six-year-old Shiva Yadav sang softly to Shahid Khan, about two-and-half-years-old, trying to lull him to sleep. Their mothers — Vime Yadav and Kureshia Begum — were busy chopping vegetables for dinner of 250 children at Dantewada's Aastha hostel in south Chhattisgarh. Vime is a cook and Kureshia works as a peon at the state government-run Aastha. They landed the jobs after their husbands were killed in...