-The Indian Express A bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and Ajay Rastogi said that to constitute an offence under the Act, the words spoken must be “in any place within public view”, and not within the four walls of a house and in the absence of any member of the public. New Delhi: Not every offending remark against a member of the Scheduled caste or Scheduled Tribe will amount...

-The Indian Express A collective of NREGA women activists discovers its political voice. As Jean Dreze recently observed, one of the key ideas behind NREGA was that it would serve as a platform for increasing the overall political capacities of workers. It was hoped that people would organise themselves to collectively demand work and, in the process, learn about other legal and constitutional provisions. While learning about the latter has been patchy,...

-The Hindu While the view about the Narendra Modi government’s culpability differs, the anger against the Nitish Kumar government on lack of employment opportunities is all pervasive Purnia/ Kishanganj: Seven months on after lakhs of migrant workers returned to their homes, many on foot, following the announcement of sudden and extended nationwide lockdown, the narrative on the ground in Bihar is divided over religious and caste lines. There are no official figures on...

-IndiaToday.in * 30 Dalit women call out caste-based discrimination at Silicon Valley companies. * A new report says caste biases are common among Indian Engineers working in tech companies. * Many Dalit engineers say they face discrimination from fellow Indian engineers.   A few weeks ago it came to light that caste-based discrimination was fairly common in the Silicon Valley companies, so common and so pervasive that it led to the California Department of...

-IndiaSpend.com Patna: The first time she heard of a woman leading a village in Bihar as its mukhiya (head), Ramvati Devi (name changed), 50, was astounded. “I couldn’t even comprehend how a woman could lead. How could she have any power over a man or the dominant castes in a village where she had walked all her life with her head covered?” she told IndiaSpend on a recent October day. In 2006,...