-Hindustan Times When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power. The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and...

-The Hindu ‘But it still remains home to one quarter of global underfed population’ India has halved its incidence of extreme poverty, from 49.4 per cent in 1994 to 24.7 per cent in 2011, ahead of the 2015 deadline set by the U.N,, shows the Millennium development Goals (MDG) Report, 2015, released on Tuesday. The report set the limit for extreme poverty as those living on $1.25 or less a day. The reduction...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The just released socio-economic and caste census data show more than 1.8 lakh manual scavengers in the country at a time virtually every state government has been denying their existence. Hundreds if not thousands in almost every state, including 2,500 in Bengal, told the surveyors they manually remove untreated human excreta from dry toilets, railway tracks and sewers - a practice banned by Parliament 22 years ago. State...

-TheWire.in   The newly released UNESCO e-atlas on out-of-school children (OOSC) provides worrying evidence not only of the low priority being accorded to basic education across developing countries, but also by the developed world in terms of the aid given to education. As many as 124 million children and adolescents worldwide are out of school, 17.7 million – or 14 per cent – of whom are Indian. The rise in the number...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Six of the 30 MPs on the joint parliamentary committee examining the land acquisition bill appear undecided, with the BJP hoping to woo them and gain a majority on the panel. The score is now tied 12-12, which means the government needs the support of at least four of the six remaining members, who have so far kept their cards close to their chest. These half-dozen are from the...