-Hindustan Times When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power. The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and...

-Tehelka The NDA government’s move to open more Jan Aushadhi stores ignores the multitude of issues currently plaguing them Amidst the jostling crowd at the Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Shahdara, Delhi, is 68-year-old Suresh Chandra, holding his medical files on one hand and prescription letter on the other. Chandra, who is a lung disease patient, moves towards the Jan Aushadhi store, situated in the hospital premises. Chandra hopes that the government-run medical...

-TheWire.in   The newly released UNESCO e-atlas on out-of-school children (OOSC) provides worrying evidence not only of the low priority being accorded to basic education across developing countries, but also by the developed world in terms of the aid given to education. As many as 124 million children and adolescents worldwide are out of school, 17.7 million – or 14 per cent – of whom are Indian. The rise in the number...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The just released socio-economic and caste census data show more than 1.8 lakh manual scavengers in the country at a time virtually every state government has been denying their existence. Hundreds if not thousands in almost every state, including 2,500 in Bengal, told the surveyors they manually remove untreated human excreta from dry toilets, railway tracks and sewers - a practice banned by Parliament 22 years ago. State...

-PTI New Delhi: Under fire for holding back state- wise findings of UNICEF's Rapid Survey on Children, the Women and Child Development Ministry has constituted a committee to examine the report following differences of opinion over the survey methodology. The committee, which is likely to submit its report within a week, includes officials from the ministries of Health and Family Welfare, and Statistics and Programme Implementation. It will work upon to reach...