-The Indian Express Agriculture doesn’t pay that much, land is no longer the source of power it once was, and the community has failed to keep up with a changing India. The Jats conform fully to the idea of a ‘dominant caste’, a term the eminent sociologist M N Srinivas used to refer to any community that is both numerically strong in a village or local area, as well as wields...

-The Hindu Censorship by hardline Hindu groups has grown, says Amnesty Criticising the government for using archaic laws to suppress dissent, Amnesty International, in its report for 2015-16, has included India among countries that have failed to match up to the “international standard” of freedom of expression and civil liberties. The report especially noted that over the past year, crackdown on freedom of expression by majoritarian groups linked to the government had intensified,...

Although there is sufficient data and evidence available in the public domain to argue whether there has been halving of poverty between 1990 and 2015, the same cannot be said with conviction about the halving of hunger—one of the targets set under the erstwhile Millennium Development Goals framework (replaced recently by SDGs). This is because the recently released data by the National Family Health Survey-4 (conducted in 2015-16) and the...

-Livemint.com The claims that Right to Education is forcing the closure of thousands of schools is false or ludicrously exaggerated Most of us who work with school education have been completely mystified by media reports and related opinion pieces which claim that thousands of private schools are being shut down because of the Right to Education Act (RTE). We (Azim Premji Foundation) conducted a field study to investigate this matter. Getting valid and...

-The Hindu Business Line The scheme has made life easier for the people of this Andhra Pradesh village, one of the first in the state to have 100 per cent financial inclusion. But the local experience also throws up a few questions relevant nationally, reports Gunturi Naga Sridhar Fourty-year-old M Ravamma, from Polavaram, a village in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, had a nightmarish experience two months ago. Her husband complained...