Uttar Pradesh may be ruled by a Dalit Chief Minister but poor Dalits in the state's rural areas continue to suffer under the oppression of upper caste politicians. One such case is that of a 50-year old dalit Budhai Ram of Sidhauli village in Sitapur district, 80 kilometres from Lucknow. Budhai Ram apparently made the mistake of filing a Right to Information petition at the office of the Sitapur district...

The city crime branch has found definite leads to a political motive behind the murder of whistleblower and RTI Activist Amit Jethava. A top political leader from Saurashtra is being suspected of have paid to kill Jethava through his nephew identified as ‘Pratap' who is close to police constableBahadur Wadher from Kodinar in Junagadh. The police are believed to have brought four more persons for questioning in this case, from...

The government’s subtle, but significant, move to divest the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) of its job of approving the genetically modified (GM) products and convert it into merely a GM appraisal body has taken the biotechnology sector by surprise. The Gazette notification to this effect replaces the word “approval” in the committee’s nomenclature with “appraisal”, thus making it the “Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee”. One obvious reason for doing so...

Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

Independent India's greatest failing must be its inability to feed its people. With 42 per cent of all children malnourished, 56 per cent of women anaemic, and the country ranked 65th out of 84 countries on the Global Hunger Index, the report card of the state on nutrition must have an F. Most disturbing is the fact that things have got worse over time. In the first half of the...