Police officers of Chhattisgarh would have us believe that people fall inside bathrooms at police stations deliberately to break their own heads or backs and later blame it on custodial torture. They say that’s what happened with Soni Sori, an ashramshala teacher from Jabeli village in the Maoist-affected Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, on October 10. In pain, drifting in and out of consciousness, benumbed by the ‘good cop, bad cop’...

At a time that land in urban centres, especially in the big metropolitan cities, is at a premium, a Working Group of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has suggested that, as far as possible, slum dwellers should be resettled at the spot where they are currently living, rather than displacing them, so that they continue to remain close to their places of work. NAC sources said the Working...

When the children of brick kiln workers approached Majlispur Free Primary School in North 24 Parganas for admission, the school authorities refused to do so as the children were unable to produce birth certificates. When the parents wrote to the District Inspector (DI), Schools, for children’s admission under Right to Education (RTE) Act, they were told no such thing as RTE existed. At Hindu Balika Vidyalaya at Contai in East Midnapore...

They could vote freely in Lok Sabha and Assembly elections but had to plead and fight for their right to exercise their franchise in local body polls. The Dalits (Pallars) of Gramapatti village in Kovilankulam panchayat under Chellampatti panchayat union near here finally got to vote in the panchayat elections for the first time in four decades. According to a section of the Dalits, the local elite's dominance, in the form of...

In the brown smog that covers Manesar this late autumn, large trucks that pack half-a-dozen cars each into their containers queue on the broken highway from Delhi to Jaipur and park any which way they can. Their drivers loll in the teashops and dhabas. Few know when their containers will be loaded with Maruti Suzuki’s deliverables: cars named Swift and Dzire and A-Star and Sx4 that have been booked by tens...