-The Hindu Female unemployment rose to 8.7% in 2015-16 from 7.7% a year earlier Jobless economic growth continues to haunt India's youth, with the country’s unemployment rate rising to a five-year high of five per cent in 2015-16, according to the latest annual household survey on employment conducted by Labour Bureau. India’s economy grew 7.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2015-16, slowing from 7.9 per cent a year earlier. The country’s...

-The Hindu Plea against govt. order making it mandatory for scholarship schemes. The Centre was caught red-handed defying a Supreme Court order directing that no citizen will be denied benefits under a government scheme for want of an Aadhaar card. A Bench of Justices Gopala V. Gowda and A.K. Goel discovered that the Centre had been insisting that students submit their Aadhaar number for applying for government scholarship schemes. On October 15, 2015, a...

-The Hindu The sense of impunity that drives discrimination against Dalits is at the heart of recent demands for the dilution, or even repeal, of the Act for prevention of atrocities against SCs and STs It is the sense of impunity nurtured by caste hierarchy that prepares the social ground for the “shockingly cruel and inhumane” crimes against Dalits called atrocities. It is this impunity that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The government's big plan to fight drought will be unveiled on Mahatma Gandhi's birthday on October 2, with three ministries on directions of the Prime Minister, joining hands to converge their schemes to 'drought-proof' vulnerable districts using technology. Narendra Modi, during meetings with the chief ministers of droughtaffected states earlier this year, had asked for a massive effort to be launched for water conservation and storage...

-The Hindu Held to account by the Supreme Court, the Central government is using opaque methods to change the key provisions of the employment guarantee scheme and make it targeted instead of universal. There is a pithy saying in Hindi that the elephant has two sets of teeth, one for show and the other to eat. This seems an apt description of the approach of the Narendra Modi government towards the implementation...