-The Hindu The killing of the Ranvir Sena chief and the violence it triggered expose the fragile foundations of Nitish Kumar's ‘new Bihar'   The assassination of Brahmeshwar Singh alias Mukhiya, founder of Ranvir Sena, the dreaded private army of upper caste Bhumihars, raises fears of the revival of “Barbaric Bihar”. From the first major massacre of Dalits in Belchi in 1977 to the killings in Mianpur in 2000 by socially dominant castes...

 Twenty-two newbie managers, fresh from B-schools across India, are raring to go. Only, they won’t make spreadsheets to sell soaps or fizzy drinks. From June, they will assist senior bureaucrats across 11 districts of Jharkhand where the Centre is funding uplift schemes. These managers — from IIT-Kharagpur, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)-Mumbai, Visva-Bharti in Bengal’s Santiniketan, XISS-Ranchi, XLRI-Jamshedpur and others — are Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows in some of...

-The Hindu   All India Confederation of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Organisations will float a confederation of Dalit Entrepreneurs for strengthening economic power of Dalits, according to Udit Raj, national chairman of the All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations. Inaugurating the office of Karnataka unit of the All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations at Hosabettu here on Sunday, Mr. Raj said the objective of launching the Confederation of Dalit Entrepreneurs (CDE) was...

-The Economic Times At the peak of Anna Hazare fever last year, anybody disagreeing with his message or prescription was branded pro-corruption. Over the last few weeks, anybody expressing disappointment at the Supreme Court upholding the Right to Education (RTE) Act is being branded anti-poor or elitist. This is unfair and unnecessary: dissent is not treason. The supporters of Anna and RTE have similar traits: impatient, intellectually certain and more interested in...

What better elixir than pure water? Thanks to Naandi, a safe drinking water programme, 3,90,536 households in rural areas across four Indian states are benefited.  Naandi, headquartered in Hyderabad, is a not-for-profit organization which works with governing bodies in rural areas, including Karnataka, to provide clean drinking water to the poor. So what really is their modus operandi? It is essentially a community-run programme where the local governing body or gram...