-CivilSocietyOnline.com Dehradun: Maletha village in Tehri Garhwal is very angry. Men, women and children sit on the road in dharna, demanding that a stone crushing company grandly called Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram be evicted from their village. The villagers’ problems began in February 2014 when two stone crushers arrived in Maletha with their machines. Their opeRATions created an ear-splitting noise and belched clouds of dust that settled on crops and orchards. In August, another...

-IPS News BETUL, India- Mamta Bai, 36, distinctly remembers the first time the police came to her village: it was December 2014 and her neighbour, Purva Bai, had just been beaten unconscious by her alcoholic husband, prompting Mamta to make a distress call to the nearest station. Once in the neighborhood, policemen pulled the abusive husband out of his home and asked the village women if they wanted him to be arrested. “Yes,”...

-The Indian Express It can be strengthened —by the collection of taxes at the local level, for instance. DemocRATic decentralisation, conceived two decades ago, seems to be a lost cause at first sight. Beyond lip service by politicians, neither panchayats nor municipalities have captured the public imagination as viable, responsive, accountable institutions of government. Just after the Karnataka panchayat elections, which ended on June 2, the continued disempowerment of local governments is...

-The Indian Express A tussle is on between El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole. Government cannot afford to be a bystander. The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted that India will get deficient rains in 2015, likely to be 88 per cent of the long period average (LPA) of 89 cm, which is the average seasonal rain (June-September) received by the country in the 50 years between 1951 and 2000....

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Same-sex rapes by fellow prisoners trigger most jail suicides, the National Human Rights Commission has said in a report, swivelling the spotlight to the administRATion of prisons and the plight of inmates. While such abuses were hardly a secret to many, this is the first such official acknowledgement by a rights panel or government organisation. The study was prompted by the suicide of a suspect in the Delhi...