-India Today The Nitish Kumar government has ordered an inquiry into the incident after the report surfaced. * Students were made to sit in different classrooms based on their caste and religion * The Bihar govt has ordered action against the principal of the school * The District Education Officer has asked for stern action against the principal A government-run school in Bihar's Vaishali district has come under scrutiny after students there complained that they...

-Newsclick.in Funding is not keeping pace with demand, and delays or vanished dues are discouraging job seekers in these times of extreme rural distress. Here is a little known but chilling fact about the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS: between April and mid-December this year, about 1.28 crore people who demanded jobs were turned back. This refusal to give work has been happening every year but it has increased after the Modi...

-Huffingtonpost.in Secrecy in amending the RTI Act as well as in the appointment of Information Commissioners in the CIC reveal the government's intention to destroy the spirit of the transparency law. With over 6 million information applications filed every year, the Indian Right to Information (RTI) Act is the most extensively used transparency legislation globally. The law has empowered ordinary citizens to hold the government accountable. It has been used for a...

-Livemint.com Declining income, shrinking farmlands, rise in number of dependents on existing holdings add to farm woes Bengaluru: Since 2000, Karnataka has put nearly 200,000 hectares of farmland to non-agricultural use, including for industrial, residential and infrastructure projects. Besides shrinking farmlands, the number of dependents on existing land holdings have also increased considering little employment opportunities elsewhere. From 1.312 million hectares in 2000-01 (cumulative), the total land put to non-agricultural use has risen...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Joining the debate on farm loan waivers, government think-tank Niti Aayog on Wednesday said such a move helps only a fraction of farmers and is no solution to mitigate agrarian distress. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi has been pressing the government on the issue, saying he will not let Prime Minister Narendra Modi sleep until a loan waiver is given to all farmers. "Farm loan waiver is not a solution...