Three men were on Saturday sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of murdering National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) engineer Satyendra Dubey, the young whistle-blower who had exposed corruption in a national highway project in Bihar, seven years ago. Mantu Kumar, Udai Kumar and Pinku Ravidas were handed the life sentence by a special CBI court judge Raghvendra Singh, who held them guilty of the murder of the 31-year-old IIT-Kanpur...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked the States to ensure speedy implementation of the Gram Nyayalaya Act to ensure speedy justice at the doorstep of the common people. He was speaking at the national convention on ‘Law, Justice and the Common Man,' organised by the Congress here on Saturday. Expressing concern over the huge backlog of cases at various levels of judiciary, Dr. Singh said once the Act was fully implemented and...

Ten days before it comes into force, the Right to Education Act has been challenged in the Supreme Court as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private and minority schools. One of the petitioners’ main complaints is that the act will force these schools to teach up to a fourth of their students free of cost if they come from the neighbourhood. Another is that the schools cannot even pick and...

Though Palakkad district in Kerala, where the Coca Cola plant is situated is considered as the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’, a part of the district falling in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats is drought prone. Plachimada, where the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverages Private Limited (HCBPL) factory was set up had been classified ‘arable’. The villagers are predominantly landless agricultural labourers with almost 80 percent of the population...

“We are angry, and upset, and do not want these wages,” says Parmila, an illiterate widow from Chittoriya panchayat in Bihar's Katihar district. Her pithy statement sums up the collective current of emotions running through the minds of the 60-odd women workers of Chittoriya, who were paid wages well below the minimum for a six-day work completed in January. As many as 123 workers from Chittoriya, half of them women, were paid...