-The Times of India AHMEDABAD: Poonam Vanzara, 15, a nomadic girl from Dahod, and a resident of Vatva in Ahmedabad, has not even been to school. She along with 14.93 lakh children in the age group of 6-18 years from Gujarat have never attended school. The census figures about attending education institute reveal that around 9.63% children and youth between 6-18 years have never attended the schools. Gujarat has 1.55 crore children...

-The Hindu Business Line Government surveys on out-of-school children are gross underestimations. The Census numbers, however, are a shocker Census 2011 showed that about 32 million children aged between 6 and 13 years have never attended any educational institution, even though government estimates of out-of-school children show substantially lower numbers. Given that out-of-school numbers consist of both children who dropped out and those who never attended school, it raises some questions over...

-The Hindu The production of waste in India is growing at an exponential rate. However, the welfare and dignity of the informal workers involved in the stigmatised sector of waste management remains at the bottom of any government’s political agenda. Human society has always produced waste and always will. Waste materials — substances without value — are constantly generated in all production, all distribution and all consumption processes. The time waste spends...

Recently meat sale and consumption was banned in five BJP-ruled states of Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Haryana and Gujarat on the pretext of not hurting the religious sentiments of Jain community during Paryushan festival. Earlier this year, beef consumption and sale was banned in Maharashtra with the passage of Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 1995. A few days back, a Muslim man named Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched by a Hindu mob...

-The Hindu District Mineral Foundations were set up to protect the interests of Adivasi communities who have borne the costs of mining. But they are flawed in their current form Through 2011-13, dogged investigators from the Justice M. B. Shah Commission on illegal mining toured the rust-red villages, forests and rivers of northern Odisha, and trawled through reams of official records including from the environment, minerals, railways, and revenue departments. They met...