There is good news for IIT aspirants from the Minority community. The IIT-JEE Admission Committee has decided to implement 4.5 per cent reservation for them within the 27 per cent seats meant for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) from this year. Those Minority candidates who had submitted the application forms online and have not mentioned their status can do so on the IIT-JEE website — http://jee.iitd.ac.in/obcMinority.php — by giving an undertaking...

The victims of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat are still to get justice but are determined to continue the fight. SAIRABEN SANDHI and Rupa Mody sit quietly on the back benches at the Metropolitan Magistrate's Court in Ahmedabad watching the proceedings in the Zakia Jafri case. Both the women have witnessed immense tragedy. One saw her son killed, while the other has been searching for her missing son for the...

-The Economic Times "We have no power." That's the message from India's most powerful - ministers in the central government's Cabinet - when asked to list the discretionary authority each enjoyed. Only one ministry concedes that it has some discretionary powers, which it is eager to shed.  Prodded by UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, a group of ministers (GoM) has the job of finding the discretionary powers enjoyed by each ministry and prune...

-PTI The government is working on a proposal to provide religion-neutral marriage certificates to people following demands by Minority groups, including Sikhs, who are shown as Hindus in official documents. An option law ministry is likely to suggest to the Cabinet is to amend the Births and Deaths Registration Act, 1969 by adding a clause on marriage registration. The law ministry proposal says that since the infrastructure to register births and deaths...

-The Hindustan Times ‘The lives of female Hindoo subjects should be henceforth more efficiently protected; that the heinous sin of cruelty to females may no longer be committed, and that the most ancient and purest system of Hin-doo religion should not any longer be set at nought by the Hindoos themselves.’ Replace ‘female Hindu subjects’ with ‘homosexuals’ and the exhortation for a return to an uncorrupted religious past with that of a...