-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

-The Hindu The Right to Education (RTE) Act turned three on March 31, 2013. It is certainly a short period to examine its efficacy, yet it is enough to give us a fair idea of the hurdles that are being faced and have to be tackled to get positive results. Most of these hurdles are attitudinal. The services of retired teachers are mostly sought for imparting "special training" to out-of-school children...

-The Telegraph Jamshedpur: A school is a primary lesson in going away from fear and towards power, feel the CRPF. Last year, the paramilitary force reopened a government-run primary school at Thalkobad at Saranda's Manoharpur block in West Singhbhum. Maoists had partially bombed the school in 2004, causing it to become one of the many Maoist-styled cradles in the area that drilled anti-democratic ideologies and taught practical lessons on bombs, guns and...

-The Hindu   One candidate asked to withdraw nomination, two others reprimanded Bangalore: The Loksatta Party, which is set to make its debut in the coming Karnataka Assembly elections promising "clean" politics, has run into trouble with three of its candidates taking public positions that appear to run counter to the party's stated ideological vision and standpoint. Phanisai Bhardwaj, the party's candidate for Bangalore South, has said on his facebook page: "Apolish [abolish] reservation...

-The Times of India PABNAWA (HARYANA): It has been over 48 hours since the attack took place. But fear still stalks the dalits of Pabnawa village in Haryana's Kaithal district. The young women from the community have been moved out en masse by their families fearing sexual assault by upper-caste goons. Some were picked up by relatives from nearby villages after desperate SOS calls; others were escorted to safety by their...