-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Sureme Court today sought responses from the Centre and six states on a public interest petition seeking a ban on cow vigilante groups across the country. These states are Gujarat -where cow vigilantes' public flogging of four Dalit men in July sparked a countrywide furore - Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. Maharashtra-based social activists and Congress sympathisers Tehseen Poonawala and his brother Shehzad Poonawala had moved...

-The Telegraph Algiers (Algeria): At a time when a debate over triple talaq and the need for a uniform civil code rages in India, a Sunni Muslim-dominated country that Vice-President Hamid Ansari just visited offers some interesting insight. Algeria, the north African country that figures in the Modi regime's Africa outreach, last year adopted a law criminalising domestic violence against women despite conservative Muslims terming it an intrusion into a couple's privacy. The...

-The Hindu Business Line By allowing children to work in family enterprises, amendments to the Child Labour Act have made them more vulnerable to exploitation. Tracking the issue will be more difficult, writes Preeti Mehra When the two houses of Parliament put their stamp on a few amendments to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 a couple of months ago, they also signed away the dignity of children and the...

-The Hindu Recent years have been a watershed in the public health programme in India. We have managed to eradicate diseases such as polio and tetanus, reduced maternal and child mortality rates significantly, halved the prevalence of tuberculosis and malaria and increased the life expectancy for both adults and children. These achievements reflect the unflinching efforts of the Indian government and all stakeholders in the past two decades to ensure health...

-The Hindu The sense of impunity that drives discrimination against Dalits is at the heart of recent demands for the dilution, or even repeal, of the Act for prevention of atrocities against SCs and STs It is the sense of impunity nurtured by caste hierarchy that prepares the social ground for the “shockingly cruel and inhumane” crimes against Dalits called atrocities. It is this impunity that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled...