-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...

-The Hindu The recent launch of the first Dalit venture fund occasions an examination of the moral and ethical emptiness of capitalism History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics B.R. Ambedkar If only Milind Kamble, founder of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) and Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit thinker, columnist and DICCI mentor, had imbibed the wisdom of Manning Marable's How Capitalism Underdeveloped...

-The Hindu Attempt to question practices invites wrath of dominant caste Madurai: Multiple forms of discrimination exist in Vadugapatti village near Usilampatti, where a 12 year-old- Dalit boy was made to carry his footwear on his head recently. Dalits can neither walk on the streets of caste Hindus with their footwear on nor can they enter common pathways on bicycles. If they violated the rule they had to face the wrath of the...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: If a sample study conducted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, is anything to go by, schools in Maharashtra have failed to bridge the caste divide between students. The study found that more 60 per cent of standards VII and IX students at Talsar village in Ratnagiri district want to make same-caste friends, while 40.5 per cent are against inter-caste marriage. Further, 35.7 per cent of students...

-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...