36 killed in suspicious encounters during anti-Veerappan operations: panel   It is nine years since a fact-finding commission constituted by the National Human Rights Commission and headed by a retired High Court judge found that at least 36 people were killed in suspicious encounters by the Special Task Force (STF) during the anti-Veerappan operations. Yet, the NHRC has not passed final orders on the complaints of atrocities against the STF. The commission, in...

What is it that makes the Indian middle class treat their domestic help with such derision and abuse? In her nine years as a nurse working with rescued domestic workers in Delhi, Mariamma K. thought she had seen the worst. That was until 2010, when she and her colleagues went to rescue a 17-year-old girl from a home in west Delhi. Sangeeta was found with bite marks all over her body....

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

Experts agree that the economic and environmental costs of interlinking India's rivers far outweigh its projected benefits. Some people believe it is the one-stop solution to prevent floods and droughts, reduce water scarcity, raise irrigation potential and increase foodgrain production in the country. But others say it is just another grandiose scheme involving huge costs and leading to long-term ecological consequences. The contentious idea of interlinking India's rivers has come...

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which went through 2,097 cases of killing of youth and mass cremation of their bodies by the Punjab police during the peak of militancy in the State, has ordered a relief of Rs.27.94 crore to the families of 1,513 victims of such extra-judicial killings. The remaining bodies were not identified. When the terrorism was at its peak during 1984-1996 in the State, police personnel, whether...