About conviction, the less said the better New figures released by the National Crime Records Bureau show India's two largest cities accounted for one-third of the rape cases registered in 2010, and underline depressing infirmities in the prosecution of perpetrators — just over a quarter of them were convicted. Last year, the national capital recorded 414 rape cases, the biggest number among 35 major cities monitored by the Bureau, followed by 194...

Herding cattle and weaving carpets, on city waste-heaps, at traffic lights, in roadside eateries, in farms and in factories, in brick kilns and coal mines, in brothels and in our homes, children of the poor work at an age when our own are in school or at play. What is remarkable is not just our collective acceptance of such diverging destinies of children merely because of the accident of where they...

-Express News Service   Two prominent members of Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption have dissociated themselves from the group in protest against its overt flirtation with politics, as seen during the Lok Sabha bypoll in Hisar.   Magsaysay Award winner Rajendra Singh, who earned fame working on water conservation in villages in Rajasthan, and P V Rajagopal, a tribal and land rights activist, have decided to quit the core committee, the 26-member panel which...

-The Economic Times   It is unfortunate that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has joined the ranks of those critical of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. He should be at the forefront of efforts to instil more transparency in the process of government, not less.  The PM raised three specific concerns; these are legitimate and need to be addressed. A flood of RTI requests wasting civil service time in processing them is one....

The government of India's Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY)a¦ is now internationally recognised for its innovative approach to harnessing information technology to reach the poor, says the World Bank in the context of the smart card-based cashless health insurance scheme. The RSBY has now been picked up by UNDP as one of the 19 schemes worldwide for its publication, Sharing Innovative Experience: Social Protection Floor Success Stories. About 20 million...