-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 Apex court says mitigating investigators need to be given access to the prisoners to dig out any circumstances which may help the court when it hears the appeal In a significant order, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the psychological evaluation of condemned prisoners by expert doctors, and access to them by mitigating investigators, are essential before the hearing begins on their appeals against the death penalty. A Bench...

-TheWire.in Methodological innovation is required to re-evaluate and investigate how backwardness is defined. The 11 criteria the Mandal Commission specified could act as a framework. The passing of the 124th Amendment Bill of the Indian constitution on January 14, 2019, made the way for a 10% ‘economically weaker sections’ or EWS quota in (a) educational institutions run by the Union government and private institutions (except those managed by minorities), and (b) in...

-Newsclick.in On December 6, the Indian Supreme Court will decide on whether non-transparent political donations are hitting the sovereignty of the Indian people and their right to know. Electoral Bonds, in the transparency and accountability graph, as claimed by the government have some inherently anti-democratic characters. Their key feature of anonymity enables a system where people do not know who are giving/donating money to the political parties they then are voting for....