Tweeters and bloggers have accused Indian TV news channels of ignoring the ongoing ethnic riots in Assam, due to a bias in favor of the Congress Party.

According to FirstPost, many have contrasted TV's late attention to the story to the rapid response and 24/7 blitz following the Gujarat riots of 2002, noting that Assam is a Congress-ruled state while the BJP is and was in power in Gujarat.

Of course the Indian media is biased to some degree, just like Fox News or the New York Times. And there might well be a tilt against Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who continues to take the blame for an unspecified role in the 2002 riots despite various court rulings that there is not enough evidence to hold him responsible.

Yet since the first tweeters drew attention to the spotty reportage, all the main newspapers have moved the Assam riots to their front pages, various web-only publications have opened up the debate on the causes and larger ramifications of the conflict, and even the international media have zeroed in. (Anybody who still expects to get their news from TV should stop reading here).

Thursday's Times of India reports:

Even with the state machinery out in full gear and soldiers maintaining vigil in four districts, violence in lower Assam continued unabated on Wednesday, with the conflagration scorching new areas in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts where eight more bodies were found.

The toll of those killed in ethnic and communal clashes, fuelled by animosity between Bodos and the rising population of Muslims who settled on tribal land, now stands at 40. The killings have led to one of the largest ever exoduses in Assam's recent history, with officials saying 1.7 lakh (170,000) people from 400 villages in Kokrajhar, Chirang and Dhubri districts are now homeless and sheltered in 128 camps that dot the conflict zone.  

So are the critics overstating the case for a bias-inspired media blackout because TV coverage was tardy?

Since Partition -- the bloody 1947 division of India and Pakistan -- the occasional flare-ups of violence between Hindus and Muslims have been seminal news events, while the riots in Assam involve a usually ignored tribal group that is vying for a separate state and a Muslim population that includes illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Moreover, not only Assam but the whole of India's northeast rarely receives national news coverage, for the simple reason that so-called "mainstream India" hardly bothers about the region or its people, who are distinct enough ethnically to seem, anyway, to hail from another country altogether.  Gujarat, on the other hand, has always been part of the mainstream.

Renowned for teaching kids the basics of reading and counting on TV, Sesame Street is moving to create actual schools in India -- where it has already brought the program to slum children who don't have television at home through a traveling road show.

Known here as "Galli Galli Sim Sim," a close-enough translation of Sesame Street, the show's a huge success. And now, Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind the popular program, is going into the franchising business with pre-schools and after-school clubs for the first time, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The non-profit has chosen to start in India where industry experts suggest that 50% of all franchises are in the education sector, freelance writer Joanna Sugden writes for the paper's India Real Time blog said.

“India has lacked in terms of creating quality education. Its private education sector has grown and is a very interesting business model that India has presented to the world because the government has not been able to deliver,” WSJ quoted a spokesman for Delhi-based Franchise India, which helps businesses expand their franchises and franchisees decide where to invest, as saying.

It's an idea that Indians have already embraced. As I reported some years ago for Newsweek, problems with government-run schools have sparked a boom in private schooling throughout the developing world. In 2000, James Tooley, an administrator for Orient Global, a Singapore company that invests in education for the poor, went walking in Hyderabad, India, and was startled to find private schools on virtually every corner. He launched a full-scale study in India, China and Africa, and everywhere, officials and aid agencies told him such schools for the poor didn't exist. But when his researchers explored the villages and slums, they found that not only did they exist, they were flourishing. "It's a tremendous success story," says Tooley. "Entrepreneurs are catering to poor, low-income families, and they're achieving better than the government at a fraction of the cost."

Sesame Street schools are now being rolled out in Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh, following its first preschool in Jaipur. Sesame Workshop aims to have 20 schools up and running by March 2013, with plans for 382 within the first five years, the WSJ said.

Spurred into action by a company lockout, the Indian government is looking into the recent violence at Maruti Suzuki's Manesar plant, concerned that the increasing frequency and severity of clashes between workers and management is hurting India's image.

 “This incident, though [it] is not related to any policy issue, would further dent India as an investment destination," the Hindustan Times quoted an unnamed government official as saying. "The government would look into the various issues including labor laws and corporate governance."

In a staff editorial, the Indian Express argues that India's labor problems "must be addressed nationally. India has developed a strong trade union movement but it has insufficient legal safeguards against unreasonable and militant trade union activity, which is harming the formal sector and discouraging investment."

Citing five incidents of similar violence in recent years, the paper claims that "foreign investors may be wary about sinking their money into a state offering insufficient protection" and calls for revision of laws that "excessively valorised labor’s right to employment over the entrepreneur’s right to security."

Similarly, the Times of India speculates in a front page article about a possible Maoist connection to the violence in Manesar, in which a plant manager was killed and more than 40 management personnel were injured in an altercation with angry workers last week.

Intelligence agencies have been asked to investigate whether Maoists are infiltrating trade unions in the Gurgaon-Manesar belt, which has witnessed serious labour trouble in the past few years, the paper said, quoting unnamed sources.

Desert divisions of India's Border Security Force will phase out camels in favor of four-wheeled "sand-scooters" if ongoing trials of vehicles from the US, China and other countries prove successful, reports the Times of India.

Given the opportunities for skimming from the contracts, and the military's fondness for gadgets, no doubt the sand-scooters will prove to be an excellent replacement for the hardy "ship of the desert." But nobody can deny that the vehicles will be more expensive to maintain, more prone to breaking down, and -- most importantly -- less romantic than the present transport favored by the camel corps.

The BSF claims that buying good camels and taking care of them is "quite a task," according to TOI -- though it's a task that can be managed by the residents of the country's desert states, rather than a foreign multinational. 

Gearheads will be interested to learn that China's 500cc Nebula Jaguar and US-based Polaris' Ranger 800, Ranger RZR 4-800 and Sportman are in the running to replace the trusty humps, along with vehicles from India's Maini Group.  

My question: Will this spell the end of Bikaner's famous camel breeding and research center?