-Deccan Herald The court allowed a plea by Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati to file a response on behalf of the Centre The Supreme Court on Thursday directed for maintaining status quo on the decision of the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee allowing the environmental release of genetically modified mustard for seed production and testing. A bench of Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and Sudhanshu Dhulia issued the oral direction on an application filed by Aruna...

-The Telegraph Bench condemns the practice as ‘regressive’ and ‘invasive’ New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday banned the decades-old “two-finger” test on rape survivors and said anyone violating the directive would be held guilty of misconduct. The two-finger test is conducted on victims of sexual assault and rape to determine whether they are habituated to sexual intercourse. Condemning the practice as “regressive” and “invasive”, a bench of Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice Hima...

-The Telegraph Citizens’ participation in policy-making is an important factor in assessing the quality of democracy Within five days of the announcement of Agnipath, the scheme had been amended 10 times, raising the larger question concerning consultation in policy-making. The Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government has taken a number of policy decisions without public consultation — from demonetisation, which saw 60 changes in 43 days, to GST, which has been...

-TheWire.in The Narela industrial complex is one of the biggest in Asia, packed with booming small-scale industrial units. It runs entirely on the labour of low-income workers who have very little say on their pay and living conditions. In order to start liberalising trade and industrial production capacity through economic policy, the Indian nation-state began implementing a set of Washington Consensus style neo-liberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. The liberalisation push across...

-The Hindu While Supreme Court has voiced concerns over their increasing use to prove a case, women’s rights activists deem the technology an empowering tool Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA tests occupy a grey area in the quest for justice, vacillating between the dangers of slipping into self-incrimination and encroachment of individual privacy and the ‘eminent need’ to unearth the truth, be in the form of evidence in a criminal case, a claim...