-The Hindu A crowd funding platform for legal fees, www.azadi.in, is enabling greater ease of Access to justice for all. The founders are four young men from Kochi Four young men from Kochi - Radhakrishnan Ram Manohar, Siddharth Vijayan, Praveen Paul and Stalvart John – a couple of years back thought up something that won our hearts – ‘Sisters Across Borders’. Those were hard times in flood-hit Kashmir; aid was pouring in...

-The Hindu We need to rethink social safety nets in India’s growing economy so that they can also focus on the accidents of life rather than solely on the accidents of birth. Sometimes the grand narratives of the Left and the Right do not seem to have any relationship with the lived experiences of ordinary Indians. For the past two decades, the Left has tried to expand social welfare programmes for the...

-The Hindu India's achievements in education were mixed, says the Congress MP. Chennai: The economic reforms that started in 1991 have helped cut poverty significantly even as inequality has widened appreciably, said Jairam Ramesh, Member of Parliament, and author of a book To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story. “Poverty has declined significantly since 1991 while inequality has gone up during the same period. Inequality has become sharper; it has become worse....

-The Indian Express Share of Muslims in official 3.7 lakh ‘beggar’ population is disproportionately larger than the community’s share in country’s population, show Census data. Mumbai: Muslims make up 14.23% of India’s population. They are, however, nearly 25% of the 3.7 lakh individuals who have been listed as beggars by the Government of India. Activists claim that the data — released last month — on the religious orientation of those deemed ‘non workers’...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Almost a quarter of India’s 370,000 beggars are Muslims, newly released data from the 2011 Census show, reinforcing that the community still lags behind on most counts despite the country’s rapid economic growth. Muslims, the largest minority who make up 14.2% of India’s 1.25-billion population, come out pretty much at the bottom of most socio-economic indices, even a decade after a high-level government probe into their historical disadvantages...