Over the past three years, the number of attacks on schools has seen a steep rise. The argument advanced by the Naxals is that schools have become police stations and security forces take cover here. To substantiate their claim they have never attacked a school when children were in it and attacks have always taken place when the school premises were closed. Security personnel who battle the Naxals however claim that...

In an upstairs classroom at a residential school in Mal, near Lucknow, the girls are revising for their exams. As the light starts to fade at the glassless windows, each girl takes a brightly coloured plastic lamp and carries it to her space on the floor. There is no electricity, but the lamps are solar powered. They have been donated jointly by Swedish company Ikea and the United Nations Children’s...

Contesting government figures, several MPs on Monday stressed that the number of manual scavengers still left in the country was much higher than what was furnished by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment — 1.17 lakh. At a meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee attached to the Ministry, they pointed out that this figure did not square with the much larger number of proposals received by the Ministry of Housing...

Behind Delhi's radical makeover for the Commonwealth Games are 150,000 migrants labourers toiling hard to meet the October deadline. TOI-Crest gives this silent workforce a name and a face. Thirty-five-year old Vijay is from Sagar village in Madhya Pradesh. His thekedar, who makes regular trips to the villages to round up skilled and unskilled labourers, had told him he'd be working on the beautification of Delhi University roads under the...

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto turned classical capitalism on its head with his trickle-up theory: that if you create wealth at the bottom of the pyramid, it will find its way up. de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, speaks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s Walk the Talk on the need for the poor to be able to participate in the global economy...