-NDTV Our journey takes us to five villages in Sehore district, Madhya Pradesh, to meet families that do not have a toilet at home. Nearly 65 per cent of households in rural areas of the state are without toilets. Prema and Tanu belong to a Scheduled Caste family of daily wagers in Ahlada Kheda. Students of Class 9 and 10, they are exposed to children from different socioeconomic backgrounds at...

-The Hindu The Adivasis of Central India, who settled in the tea gardens of Assam decades ago, are still devoid of their basic rights. The even greater tragedy of the coordinated murderous December 23, 2014, attack on unarmed Adivasi forest dwellers in Assam, which left dead more than 70 people including children and women, is that the assault targeted one of the most oppressed and dispossessed communities in that entire region. A meticulously...

-The Financial Express   Prime minister Narendra Modi has done well to launch a soil health card scheme, from Suratgarh in Rajasthan, which is slated to cover 14 crore farmers in the next three years. Soil health cards are an Important component of agriculture reform since they help impress upon the farmer the damage done to the soil by excess use of the heavily-subsidised urea in comparison with other fertilisers. While the...

-PTI New Delhi: A "callous approach" and a tendency to "unnecessarily" label documents as "secret or classified" is at the root of espionage scandals of the kind that surfaced last week, former bureaucrats have said and sought greater disclosure instead. "There have been government instructions on dealing with sensitive and classified information. There are standard operating procedures, too. In this incident, it seems someone at some level has been callous," former cabinet...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Amendments proposed by the previous Congress-led union government to the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996 had the potential of improving upon this progressive legislation. Unfortunately, with its successor pursuing different priorities, the possibility of the amendments being passed remains rather low. Kamal Nayan Choubey (kamalnayanchoubey@gmail.com) is with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. A bill for an amendment to the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas)...