The S.C. and S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has failed to make Dalits any safer. THE ascent of the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to power in Uttar Pradesh on May 13, 2007, was seen as a defining moment in the politics of Dalit empowerment in the country. The Scheduled Caste (S.C.) leader of an avowedly “Dalit assertive” party had been Chief Minister earlier too, but the difference this time...

Some news is considered more worth publicizing than some other news. This is part of an essential discipline, for otherwise we will remain perennially buried under an avalanche of data, information and gossip. The wheat, never mind the change of metaphor, has to be separated from the chaff. The media perform this task. Occasionally the government of the land helps the media to do the choosing: the authorities have their...

Ever since Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, which castigated India as a “soft state”, western observers, as well as many members of the Nehruvian wing of Macaulay’s children, have failed to understand the anarchical society which has existed in India for millennia. A recent review (Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009) by Lant Pritchett (a former World Bank official in Delhi) of Financial Times’ former India correspondent Edward Luce’s book In...

The head of the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) today wrapped up a five-day visit to India, during which a major focus of discussions was protecting traditional knowledge, genetic resources and folklore. Director General Francis Gurry lauded India as a “pioneer” in dealing with questions related to these three issues, according to a news release issued by the Geneva-based agency. In particular, he highlighted the publicly available Traditional...

The Central Information Commission has ordered the IITs to disclose most details of candidates who sat the 2009 entrance examination, rejecting the institutes’ argument that revealing candidates’ names would be a breach of their privacy. India’s apex watchdog for the Right to Information Act has ordered the IITs to reveal the names, addresses, pin codes and marks of all students who appeared in the Joint Entrance Examination this year. In its November...