When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...

Responding to the lack of computer training in Mukteshwar’s schools, Veena Sethi, a retired Delhi University professor, set up two used personal computers in the basement of her home with the aim of bringing the basics of computing to school children. "There were no libraries, no laboratories and no computer classes. In fact, most of the schools in Mukteshwar [which is in the Nainital district of northern Uttarakhand state] had no...

Chief minister Arjun Munda plans to hold cabinet meetings in the districts in a bid to bring about transparency in governance. “We’ll start holding cabinet meetings in all the districts of Jharkhand, including the remote ones, after the budget session,” the chief minister said, after paying tributes to the martyrs of the 1948 mutiny in Kharsawan, about 55km from Jamshedpur, today. He added that his government would also ensure that officials actively...

Between the technical rigour and finality of CAG audit and people's airing of grievances, a new audit system that subscribes to, and strengthens, open government may be waiting to be born. The new system is envisaged as one where the CAG’s formal audit includes the relatively new concept of community-led social audit . The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA) presents an opportunity to do this. Traditionally, auditing is a...

Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...