-The Hindu Under the PCR Act, 34 cases were registered in 2010 as against 10 in 2009 There has been a marked increase in crimes against people belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in Karnataka in 2010 in comparison to that in 2009, particularly in the cases booked under the Protection of Civil Rights (PCR) Act and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act. According to the ‘Crime...

Ara, Patna: To any old-timer, the earliest image of the Bihar caste wars is from 1977. Belchhi in Patna had seen 14 Scheduled Caste workers killed, and the enduring image is of a visit by Indira Gandhi, otherwise lying low since the post-Emergency defeat. She had to ride an elephant to the small hamlet of Dalits, the monsoon having waterlogged the approach road. The caste wars Belchhi triggered would not stop...

Andhra HC judgment redefines the complex relationship between religion, caste and reservations The recent judgment of the Andhra Pradesh high court that sets aside a sub-quota of 4.5 per cent for “socially and educationally backward classes of citizens belonging to minorities” within the 27 per cent reservation for OBCs reminds us of the contested notion of backwardness in the Indian context. Highlighting serious concerns regarding the ways in which social backwardness...

The marginalisation of tribals in the last few decades has been enormous. Tribals have lost out in agriculture, and their foreSTs also stand depleted, writes KD Singh In 2006, the Prime Minister described the Maoist threat as “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country” and suggested development in insurgency-affected regions as the key remedy. In 2009, the Union Government announced a new nationwide initiative, the ‘Integrated Action...

Each year boys max out seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology. But the count of girls who secured JEE ranks has doubled to 2,886 since the last edition of the exam. Yet, the tech schools will on another front continue to be an unequal world: students from the IIT-Bombay zone (home to Kota) dominate the list of selected candidates. But the southern zone has bagged the credit for having...