When Sujatha’s husband learned that she had conceived just five months after they got married, he became agitated over what he called her "ill-timed pregnancy". To worsen her husband’s anxiety, a test to determine the sex of the foetus showed she was carrying a girl. Sujatha, a public school teacher, and her husband, a civil engineer – who asked that their full names be withheld – are from well-off and educated...

-The Times of India   Only a handful of officials have read the Mahatma Gandhi national rural employment guarantee Act. That was admitted by the officials, who attended a review meeting on the national rural employment guarantee scheme on Monday. The meeting was convened in the wake of complaints from the elected representatives during a Karnataka Development Programme (KDP) review meeting on June 27 when it was established that the district...

-BBC   At least 69 people have been killed and almost 250 injured in a TRAIn derailment in northern India. A dozen coaches of the Kalka Mail passenger TRAIn left the rails near the town of Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh. Rescue workers and locals have been working through the night to try to free trapped passengers from the badly damaged carriages. The TRAIn was travelling from Howrah near Calcutta to the capital Delhi and...

A Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Sudershan Reddy and Surinder Singh Nijjar passed orders in two politically sensitive cases this week.These orders have caused much controversy over the role of judiciary in constitutional cases. In the first of the two cases, Nandini Sundar v State of Chattisgarh, the judges held that the armed deployment of ill-TRAIned, uneducated and poor tribal youths in combat operations against Naxals by appointing them as...

The Supreme Court order against the Salwa Judum’s vigilantism in Chhattisgarh must be read by all, especially government officials. The details of the civil war in the tribal districts of Chhattisgarh are largely unknown to most readers of this newspaper. For the region is remote and inaccessible, and easily ignored by the national media.   This civil war pits, on the one side, Maoist extremists, and, on the other, a band of...