-Frontline Members of denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, treated as criminal tribes by the colonial rulers, have no place to call their own and no land, no rights, and no support from the government.  Emaciated, eyes sunken deep into sockets, skin hanging loose, almost gasping for breath, Indro Devi and Sarvnath, a couple in their eighties, lie on polythene sheets in an 8×10 square-foot tent made of rags, by a stinking nullah...

-Economic and Political Weekly  The Government of India is considering a proposal to notify farming as an essential service. This is ostensibly to bring drought relief to farmers suffering from a weak monsoon - a laudable goal indeed. However, if farming is deemed an "essential service", farmers and farm workers could lose many of their political and civic rights because the government can then invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act to...

-The Times of India The CBI on Tuesday named former Gujarat minister of state for home Amit Shah and over half a dozen IPS officers, including former CID (crime) chief OP Mathur, as accused in the Tulsiram Prajapati fake encounter case of 2006. They were among the 20 people named in the CBI chargesheet. Considered to be one of the favourite cops of chief minister Narendra Modi, Mathur and former state police...

-The Telegraph Ahmedabad, Sept. 2: Rajesh Shah, 32, is an engineering graduate and former stockbroker but claims he knew nothing about Adolf Hitler when he opened his latest menswear shop 10 days ago and named it “Hitler”, earning international notoriety. He says the store, which he co-owns, draws its name from the nickname “Hitler” by which his business partner’s late grandfather Dungromal Chandani, a very “strict” man, was known. Ask him about the...

-The Telegraph The National Commission for Women has acted on less than a fourth of the cases registered with it since 2007 and been able to close less than one in eight. Answering a question in Parliament last month, women and child development minister Krishna Tirath said the commission had received 86,364 complaints in the past five years but acted on only around 20,000. “So far, around 20,000 cases have been acted upon,...