-The Indian Express Pranab Mukherjee referred to the civil services as the one that find ways on how to put obstructions, how to find out excuses and not to move. Former President Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday said that bureaucracy is the biggest hurdle in development and need to be rectified. Delivering the concluding part of his lecture series as a guest faculty for the “Public Policy for Inclusive Development of India” course...

-The Telegraph We rank 138th out of 180 countries on press freedom, and among the highest for murders of journalists pending investigation India’s list of dubious distinctions is growing, especially with regard to the fourth estate. If it were not bad enough that the country has steadily been sliding downward each year on the World Press Freedom Index — at present, it ranks 138th out of 180 countries, just one place ahead...

-TheWire.in The court has placed strict restrictions on the scope of the project while striking down contentious provisions of the Aadhaar Act. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday declared the Aadhaar programme and the Aadhaar Act 2016 to be constitutional, but placed strict limitations on the scope of the project while striking down several contentious provisions of the legislation including clauses that allowed sharing of data for national security purposes and...

-The Hindu The debate on privatising higher education must be founded on the role of such institutions in developing a democratic and inclusive society. Motihari University, Manipur University, Hyderabad Central University, Jawaharlal Nehru University — these names have become shorthand for a set of problems that get framed differently depending on who does the analysis. The list of campuses of public-funded higher education institutions where anger is simmering or has flared up...

-The Hindu Dissenters of the past in India were great moral agitators, introducing social, intellectual and spiritual turbulence in public life. Would they have survived today? Dissent is not only the “safety valve of democracy”, as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud reminded us, but vital for meaningful social life. Societies stultify when everyone converges on a single opinion or when official stories go unchallenged. Flaws congeal and social rot sets in. Right or wrong,...