A 50-year-old Dalit woman who had complained of being denied entry into a temple in Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh's village, Jait, about three months ago, has now alleged that she was raped by two men for speaking against the upper castes. The woman had spoken out against discrimination by upper castes in Jait three months ago and that complaint had caused major embarrassment to Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj...

The one-man inquiry commission constituted under Justice Iqbal Singh, a former Judge of the Punjab and Haryana HC, to probe the Mirchpur incident of April 1this year in which two Dalits were burnt alive and 18 houses of the community were torched, has got an extension of six months. Sources said the notification pertaining to the extension of the commission’s tenure would be issued shortly. The commission, constituted on June...

The Maharashtra Government has imposed fines of over Rs 26 lakh collectively on primary information officers for ignoring and delaying answers to queries received under the Right to Information Act. On completion of five years of implementation of RTI, as per the figures revealed by state’s Chief Information Commissioner Suresh Joshi on Monday, in 2009, 347 officers were fined Rs 26,57,691 for ignoring the queries and delaying information. The fine has...

Delhi is an anxious city this monsoon season, struggling to meet an onerous deadline. Preparations continue at a feverish pace for the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG), which will bear down on the Indian metropolis October 3-14, along with some 8,500 athletes from the 71 states and territories that were once part of the British Empire. Around-the-clock construction and spells of heavy monsoon rain have turned Delhi into a swirl of mud...

Responding to allegations that Border Security Force personnel tortured Adivasis in Kanker, Chhattisgarh, into confessing that they were Maoist cadres, the Chhattisgarh Commission for Scheduled Tribes has initiated an inquiry into the incident. The allegations were published by The Hindu on September 11 and September 13 as part of an investigation into the arrest of 17 alleged Maoists at Kanker last week. Adivasis of Pachangi and Aloor villages in Kanker told...