Bihar has been in the news recently for recording an average growth rate of 11.3 per cent for the period between 2004 and 2009. Much has been written about the quality of governance and the improved state of roads. This is indeed commendable, and no mean achievement, for a State that had virtually become a “development outcast”. I was pleasantly surprised to note on a recent trip to Bihar the...

Each night, as temperatures continue to plunge and Delhi shivers through its coldest winter in the last decade, a few more people lose their lives on its streets. The people who succumb to the cold include rickshaw-pullers, balloon-sellers and casual workers, the footloose underclass of dispossessed people who build and service the capital city of the country and yet are forced to sleep under the open sky. They die because...

The government has decided to simplify the process of issuing disability certificates through a slew of steps that would among other things relieve disadvantaged people in rural areas of the trouble of making long, “cumbersome” trips. The social justice ministry has decided to let doctors at primary health centres issue disability certificates to those with visible handicaps such as blindness, amputations and paralysis of limbs. At present, a person with disabilities has...

At least two cases of hunger deaths have been reported from Jabalpur district of MP and Chittorgarh district of Rajasthan in the past few weeks. The two states are run by different political parties-- the BJP and the Congress-- but there is quite a lot common in the victims’ circumstances. Both families were among the poorest in their villages but were not included in the BPL list and both the...

She was a minor; her alleged assaulter a man with clout. The police initially turned her away; while a decade later, her case is still on in courts. And while Ruchika Girhotra’s tragic story may have got the nation’s and government’s ear, no one remembers the then 13-year-old Dalit girl who was allegedly gangraped on the night of the Dhuleti festival, a day after Holi, in a Vadodara village by...