Directs Centre to frame rehabilitation scheme for rescued children ‘Issue suitable notifications within two months to prohibit employment of children in circuses' Instances of children being forcefully detained, sometimes under extreme inhuman conditions The Supreme Court on Monday banned the employment of children in circuses and directed the Union government to take immediate steps to rescue those engaged in such employment. A Bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and A.K. Patnaik, passing orders on a...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

Reconsidering its earlier decision, the United Progressive Alliance government is now contemplating not to give direct inclusion to all members of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities in the proposed BPL list if one goes by the modalities being laid out for conducting the census. Their inclusion will now be based on their ranking obtained from the number of Deprivation indicators they satisfy. Similarly, minorities too don't get the same...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...

The court presses home its power to intervene when 'little Indians lose their small property' to land acquisition by state governments Parliament has not been able to pass an updated land acquisition law for several years, though this is a burning issue and innocent blood has been shed in many states. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continues to deliver judgments in which disputes arose several decades ago. Two such decisions in recent...