-The Hindu More needs to be done to enforce the law banning manual scavenging. This monsoon, India's Parliament passed a law of enormous social significance prohibiting and punishing manual scavenging, which remains the most degrading form of untouchability and caste discrimination in the country. This is not the first time this practice was outlawed: untouchability and forced labour were forbidden in the Constitution itself and, in 1993, a law was first passed...

-Press Information Bureau The India Rural Development Report 2012/13 was released here by Shri Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Rural Development, Government of India. The Report was prepared by IDFC Foundation in collaboration with network partners, the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), the Institute for Rural Management Anand (IRMA), and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), with contributions from several other researchers, experts and civil society organisations. On...

-The Hindu The huge deficit in blood availability outside urban centres must jolt the government into legalising unbanked blood supply Twenty-year-old Putul, living in a village 70 km from a district headquarters town in Chhattisgarh, had been in labour for two days and a night. It was her first pregnancy. In order to hasten labour, the local quack administered several injections that increased her uterine contractions. Forty hours after the onset of...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: As many as nine central government departments, including the railways and the ministries of finance, commerce and petroleum, could be in the dock for flouting employment laws governing contract workers. The Central Labour Commissioner has sought compliance reports for contract workers deployed in several ministries, including the commissioner's own office in the labour ministry, which uses the services of 20 contract employees via a private software firm. The...

-The Hindu Health activists demand public disclosure of maternal death reviews and the remedial action taken Twenty-two-year-old Kousalya (name changed), a Scheduled Caste woman in a remote village in Karnataka, was in an abusive marriage. She had suffered a late miscarriage in her first pregnancy and had been very careful with seeking antenatal care early in this pregnancy. She had moderate anaemia which was not identified or treated at the taluka hospital....