-PTI Vigilante groups target Dalits as they are "soft targets" while refraining from confronting those involved in cow slaughter: fact finding team. Ahmedabad: A fact finding team which visited Gujarat’s Una town in connection with the brutal assault of Dalits, has claimed to have found a new trend among ‘cow vigilantes’ to show bravado by making a particular Dalit community as their “soft target”. The incident of beating up of seven Dalit youths...

-The Times of India Bamnipal/ Sukinda: Between March and June this year, at least 12 children died in Nagada village, located in the forests of Odisha's Jajpur district. The underlying reason for their deaths was malnutrition, local medical authorities and community workers said. The village population is solely of the Juang scheduled tribe, one of India's ancient tribes, declared 'particularly vulnerable' by the government. For the past two months, a chicken pox...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Free health-care services during childbirth remain a pipe dream for most of India's poor, whether it relates to diagnostic tests, medicines, transport or even food, despite the Union health ministry launching a "free entitlements" programme five years ago. The families of most women who seek childbirth in government hospitals are forced to pay for supposedly "free" services, at times experiencing catastrophic expenditures likely to accentuate their poverty, two...

-Livemint.com Economist Joseph Stiglitz says govt clampdown on NGOs such as Greenpeace and Ford Foundation and the JNU row shine a poor light on India globally Bengaluru: Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has a blunt message for Prime Minster Narendra Modi: India has an image problem after the government’s clampdown on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and its actions against students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). “Some issues have got a lot of public...

-The Hindu Confining it to just the Ministry of Rural Development would be the most retrograde step in democratic decentralisation in over a quarter century. If, as The Hindu’s exclusive on Wednesday indicates, Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to close down the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, it would confirm one’s worst fears about his government’s hypocritical approach to grass-roots democracy for grass-roots development. This was a lacuna that was evident in the ‘Gujarat...