The Guwahati molestation incident throws light on the violence women face overtly and covertly in India, at home and outside. The shocking incident of the beating and molestation of a young woman by a mob in Guwahati in Assam on July 9 has exposed the ugly underbelly of modern, globalised India, where women face violence, covertly and overtly, at home and outside. The incident has also exposed the lackadaisical manner in...

-The Telegraph Ten-year-old Ayush Chauhan was smart as well as lucky. The Class IV student gave a fictitious phone number to the three kidnappers who had dragged him into a car on a Ghaziabad street on May 11. As they kept trying the number to make a ransom call to his father, Ayush gave them the slip. Eighteen-day-old Saumya Lodi had no such luck when two masked men kidnapped her from her home...

-The Telegraph This is one ascent to the top Bengal could have done without. The National Crime Records Bureau has put the state at the top of the list of crimes against women. According to the bureau’s latest report — for 2011 — Bengal accounted for nearly 12.7 per cent of the total number of crimes against women registered in India. Of them, 2,363 were cases of rape. The report has come at a...

Punjab’s agricultural sector grew at 1.6 per cent during the 11th Plan against the national average of 3.41 per cent. The growth is tardy owing to near saturation in productivity. The rural debts in Punjab are estimated to be Rs 35,000 crore. The number of indebted rural households in Punjab is 66 per cent, third highest in the country after Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The Government of India’s debt...

-The Hindustan Times Two years ago, nine-year-old Vishal got beaten up real bad by the class bullies at the government school in Lal Kuan in south Delhi. The bullies also tore up some of his school texts and threw away others. After that day, a petrified Vishal just couldn’t muster up enough courage to go back to school. Worse still, he couldn’t tell his parents — Radhe Shyam and Manju — about...