-The Tribune The recent violence that consumed Delhi forces us to confront a horrific if familiar truth: media-constructed ‘enemies’ eventually turn into flesh-and-blood people. The pogrom against the Sikhs in 1984, as the work of academics like the Oxford-based Pritam Singh reminds us, was preceded by what Singh termed “deeply embedded institutional communalism” in the coverage of events like Operation Bluestar and Indira Gandhi’s funeral by government-run media All India Radio and...

-The Indian Express Capping withdrawals for Yes Bank depositors is foolish for two specific reasons, particularly when the economy is floundering with growth rates of around 5%. On March 5, the RBI imposed a cap of Rs 50,000 on withdrawals by Yes Bank depositors. A day later, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman assured depositors that their money was safe. In the days and weeks running up to the RBI decision to supersede the Yes...

-PTI/ The Hindu ‘The police can take action including registration of FIRs’ The Delhi High Court has been told by the AAP government that under the penal law, food adulteration is a cognisable offence against which the police can take action, including registration of FIRs. The submission was made before a Bench of Justices G.S. Sistani and A.J. Bhambhani which had earlier said that the use of pesticides and chemicals to ripen fruits...

-Newsclick.in Reviving the economy requires, apart from social peace, a powerful fiscal intervention going well beyond what neo-liberalism allows. Changes in estimation methods have of late made statistics on the Indian economy increasingly bewildering; besides, whenever the statistics show the performance of the economy in a poor light, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government simply suppresses them. Nothing, however, can suppress the fact that the Indian economy is sliding into a serious...

-The Hindu There is a link between disability, loss of employment and impoverishment in rural India Of the world’s population, 15% live with some form of disability. Are disabilities associated with economic hardships through loss of employment and consequent impoverishment in rural India? For lack of more recent data (the NSS does not cover disabilities) we tried to answer this question by using the two rounds of the India Human Development Survey...