#Social Justice

Empty school classroom with desks and chalkboard

NEET is not merit, it is monopoly: the case for ending the single exam

A single national entrance test rewards coaching-class privilege, not talent. It shuts out rural, Tamil-medium and first-generation learners while paper leaks rot its credibility. Tamil Nadu's fight against NEET — from Assembly resolutions to the anti-NEET signature campaign — is social justice in Periyar's lineage.

2 October 2026 · 4 min read

The Madras High Court in Chennai. The First Bench has registered a suo motu public interest case on caste names in public places.

Tamil Nadu

Madras High Court opens suo motu case to strip caste names from Tamil Nadu's streets

A Division Bench led by Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari has given the State four weeks to report which caste appellations on streets, roads and localities have been removed, and which still remain, nearly five decades after a 1978 order first demanded it.

1 October 2026 · 4 min read

A village sign board in Thanjavur district. Place names travel into every official document that carries an address.

Opinion

A street should not carry a caste

The High Court has done what successive governments promised in 1978 and never finished. The State's status report must be honest, public and followed by a deadline.

1 October 2026 · 2 min read

Ripon Building, Chennai. Communal representation in public appointments, first ordered in 1921, reshaped who worked in the Presidency's offices.

History

16 September 1921: G.O. No. 613 and the birth of reservation in public appointments

The first Justice government issued the first communal Government Order, making an elected body the first in Indian legislative history to provide for reservation. It also exposed who the new system left out.

25 September 2026 · 2 min read

Victoria Public Hall, Madras, associated with the founding of the South Indian Liberal Federation in 1916.

History

20 November 1916: the evening a movement was founded in Madras

How a gathering of non-Brahmin leaders in Vepery created the South Indian People's Association and the South Indian Liberal Federation, the organisation history remembers as the Justice Party.

20 September 2026 · 3 min read