-The Times of India MUMBAI: Students making it to India's best public engineering colleges this session might have more to tackle than study pressure. Making for a sharp economic divide on campus, two large cohorts of students in the class of 2017 in the IITs are from the upper middle classes and from the lower income groups. This year, one out of every five students (over 20%) who qualified disclosed that the...

-The Indian Express The Supreme Court order restricting authorities from denying a benefit or service to any citizen of India for not having an Aadhaar card has put the Congress-led government, which had made Aadhaar the basis of its ambitious and overarching Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme, in a tight spot. The idea behind linking DBT - which aims at eliminating middlemen and plugging leakages in schemes - to Aadhaar was sound,...

-Live Mint ‘Give me any job... but please take me out of this hell', says 57-year-old Saraswati, a manual scavenger New Delhi: Saraswati doesn't remember the last time her bare hands touched the statues of the gods lying on a shaky wooden plank in a corner of her one-room house in Farrukhnagar village of Ghaziabad district. She doesn't remember the last time she prayed or fasted. She says every part of her body...

-FirstPost.com It's a daily scene at the busy Gariahat crossing in Kolkata. Traffic is barreling down in all directions. Minibuses make screeching right turns at breakneck speed. The tramline in the middle of the street has been dug up and is a giant crater occupying half the road, marked by corrugated metal walls and little red flags. Taxis and autos dodge buses to try and squeeze by the construction onto a...

-The United Nations The number of child labourers worldwide has declined by one third since 2000, from 246 million to 168 million, the United Nations reported today, while adding that this is still not enough to achieve the goal of eliminating the worst forms of the practice by 2016. "We are moving in the right direction but progress is still too slow. If we are serious about ending the scourge of child...