-PTI The Maoist are recruiting and indoctrinating children and had constituted children's squads and associations as part of mass mobilisation, a UN report said. The annual report of the UN secretary-general on children and armed conflict, submitted to the Security Council last week, said information has been received on recruitment and use of children by Naxalites, particularly in Chhattisgarh and some districts in adjoining states. "Maoist armed groups were recruiting and indoctrinating children,...

-Live Mint To maintain his constant stream of RTI petitions, Agrawal says he gets ideas from day-to-day observations, news reports, government insiders, whistle-blowers and journalists. In the summer of 1985, a cloth merchant in Chandni Chowk, the crowded market in the old quarters of Delhi, received a call in response to a letter he had written to the papers asking why his favourite weekly television serial, Rajani, could not be aired daily...

Indefinite curfew was imposed in the remote Joga town of Mansa district in Punjab on Sunday when angry villagers attacked, set afire and razed a factory, after reports spread that the premises was used for cow slaughter. Two houses of factory owners were also destroyed. No loss of life has been reported. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal ordered the suspension of district police chief S.S. Chahal for dereliction of duty. Tension had...

Rejecting the view that the cartoon in the Standard XII textbook, prepared by the NCERT, denigrated the anti-Hindi movement in Tamil Nadu, Yogendra Yadav, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, argued that the “book is one of the first attempts in the history of textbook writing in India to have given due prominence to the Dravidian Movement in post-Independent India.” “I am shocked and surprised to see that...

-The Hindu A petition submitted to Prof. Sukhadeo Thorat, Chairperson, NCERT Textbooks Review Committee, by leading Dalit and non-Dalit writers, scholars and activists. When NCERT's Class XI Political Science textbook, Indian Constitution at Work , came to the attention of some Dalit activists, they objected to the manner in which the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, had been depicted riding a snail representing the Constitution, with...