Sardarpura, 50 km from Mehsana town and not far from Vadnagar, home of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, had been declared a Samras village, part of one of the first schemes launched by Modi after he took charge in 2001. Under the scheme, a village could appoint its sarpanch unanimously without an election. In Sardarpura, sarpanch Kachra Tribhovan Patel and former sarpanch Kanu Joitaram Patel were among the accused. Both were among...

-Reuters On a hot afternoon, a bright orange bus drives into a slum area of the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, parking amidst shelters made of tarpaulins and bits of wood. Barefoot children come running, eyes shining, and troop inside.  It's a school on wheels that brings education to the doorstep of disadvantaged children such as these every day, halting for several hours at a time in different parts of...

A stream of men holding bows and arrows slid through the lanes of Raipur's Civil Lines, coming to a startling stop outside chief minister Raman Singh's residence on November 1, the founding day of Chhattisgarh. As the police whisked them away, the tribal protestors told journalists they were asking for the most basic constitutional right: proportional reservation in government jobs.  Eleven years ago, the sprawling state of Madhya Pradesh was trimmed...

-PTI Making some headway towards resolution of the Kudankulam issue, anti-plant protesters on Tuesday decided to nominate two of their members in the expert committee to be set up by the Tamil Nadu government. The protesters, however, made it clear that they would not hold talks with the 15-member committee set up by the Centre till the work at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) was stopped. S.P. Udhayakumar, the movement’s leader, told...

Nothing straight can ever emerge from the crooked timber of a parochial mind. Those responsible for the decision to drop A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana from Delhi University’s undergraduate Arts course argue in substance that from childhood these students are told about the sacred character of the epic. This is why it occupies a special place in the Indian psyche. Its characters are perceived to be divine creatures. To...