-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-The Hindu On Monday, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, completes three years of its existence - the time frame within which authorities were to ensure that its provisions were fully implemented - to make basic education a legal entitlement to all children aged 6-14. However, official statistics and reports from the field paint a far-from satisfactory picture, with citizens moving court against the competent authority...

-The Times of India CHENNAI: Holding that no person should languish in jail just because no one was willing or available to stand surety for him, the Madras high court ordered the immediate release of 73 undertrial prisoners, who were in jail for long periods despite having got bail. They will all now be released on their own bond. While granting bail, a surety is insisted upon by courts because the person...

-The Hindu India accounts for the largest number of deaths of infants primarily because it has failed to provide them and their mothers access to critical health care India loses 4,200 children under the age of five every day. This figure is certainly unacceptable for any emerging country. The collective ache of losing so many newborns is worsened by the realisation that many of these deaths are preventable. The country accounts for nearly...

-The Times of India Jitendra Choudhury will probably never forget March 2, 2013, the day he was hung from a tree for beating his wife. A kangaroo court in Bokaro held at the behest of JMM legislator Jagannath Mahto reportedly meted out this medieval-style justice after his wife complained that he often got drunk and misbehaved with her. Primitive, powerful and potent, large swathes of India are still governed by kangaroo courts...