Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...

-The Hindu Employees from the community say they have poor representation in officer ranks The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre and public sector banking authorities to consider providing reservation to Scheduled Castes and scheduled tribes employees in promotion to officers’ ranks at all levels. “The grievance of the employees belonging to the Scheduled Castes and scheduled tribes category is that there is negligible representation of employees belonging to their community in...

-Frontline The Janlokpal Bill passed by the Delhi Assembly on December 3 fails to meet the goals of the 2011 anti-corruption movement and is a pale shadow of the 2014 Bill. IT took the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government, which came to power in Delhi with a massive mandate in the Assembly elections held in February, 10 months to seek to fulfil one of its key election promises: the passage of...

-Business Standard Roughly 20% of ST households own a television, compared with 39% of SC households Scheduled caste (SC) households are materially better off than scheduled tribe (ST) households, according to the latest census data on asset ownership. Data released on Wednesday showed 38.5 per cent of ST households owned none of the eight assets on which information was collected in 2011, while only 22.6 per cent of SC households owned none...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A rough comparison between a government survey of all the country's campuses and a more limited scan earlier by the Rajinder Sachar committee suggests that Muslims' participation in higher education has seen little improvement over the past decade. Sachar, a retired judge, told The Telegraph the latest findings buttressed his view that the UPA government had failed to adequately implement its educational schemes for the minorities, announced after...