Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

Off With Their Rights...     * As many as 3 lakh slum dwellers in Delhi were evicted before the Commonwealth Games     * When a family is evicted, each member loses many rights—the rights to livelihood, shelter, health, education etc     * Of some 60,000 beggars on Delhi streets, more than 50,000 were removed for the Games *** Forget the razzle-dazzle and the hype over the recently concluded Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Delhi. The human...

All school children across the country will soon have unique identification numbers (UID) which will help in tracking their movement in educational institutions and academic records. This follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Union Human Resource Development Ministry and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) here on Wednesday. The system will help in tracking students' mobility by creating an electronic registry, right from the primary level through...

“Inside the mine everything is very fragile. Even the falling of a small rock can cause death sometimes. People from outside cannot imagine what the hell is inside the mine!” These are the words of 16-year old Muzzammal Haque who works in a coal mine in the Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya. He is yet another example of the bonded child labour in the various coal mines in the Jaintia Hills on...

Bardani Logun sits on a plastic chair in the communal room of a hostel in Rohini, north Delhi, where she lives with her toddler, and speaks candidly about being beaten, abused and starved. She is one of countless young women from the tribal belt of India who have migrated to Delhi to find work as live-in maids, hoping to send their earnings back home to support impoverished families in Jharkhand, Orissa,...