-Express News Service   In what could strengthen the case of those seeking lifting of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) from parts of J&K and insurgency-hit North-East, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has said the AFSPA “remains in force in Jammu & Kashmir and the North-Eastern States, conferring an impunity that often leads to the violation of human rights”. This (continuation of AFSPA), a report prepared by the NHRC...

We have five million children in the labour market, say official figures. Their actual numbers may be four times as many. As a nation, we have failed each one of them…   Millions of our children still labour today, in factories, farms, kilns, mines, homes and city waste dumps, when they should be in school or in a playground. We profoundly fail these children, collectively depriving them of education, play, rest, healthy...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...

Assam tea has failed to capture the market in the very country whose planters made it a marketable commodity in the state 150 years ago. The situation, however, can be turned around with a better marketing strategy, Mark Kibblewhite, an eminent tea scientist and a professor at Cranfield University in the UK, told The Telegraph on the sidelines of World Tea Science Congress which began at Tocklai Experimental Station at Cinnamara,...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday granted bail to Unitech's Sanjay Chandra, Swan Telecom's Vinod Goenka and top Reliance ADAG executives Gautam Doshi, Hari Nair and Surendra Pipara in the 2G scam case. The judgment was delivered by a bench of Justices G S Singhvi and H L Dattu on Wednesday morning. The apex court asked each accused to give a bail Bond of Rs 5 lakhs with 2 sureties each. This is the...