-The New Indian Express Over 40 lakh people were left out of Assam’s draft citizenship list. India is a land of immigrants. Inclusion, not exclusion, has been our motto The second draft of Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) has been published with 40 lakh people not finding their names in it. They are on the verge of becoming stateless. There are apprehensions of ethnic cleansing or disenfranchisement now due to the...

-The Indian Express Can a democracy permit so many to be in a state of liminal legality? NRC poses a political and moral question The possibility — whether immediate or somewhat remote — that at the end of the process as many as 4 million people may lose their legal status as citizens should not be a cause of celebration in a democracy. Nor should it generate a mad rush among...

-The Telegraph When Thakur was arrested, police officer got 'calls from six VIPs' Muzaffarpur: Brajesh Thakur - the arrested proprietor of an NGO that ran the Bihar Government-funded shelter home in Muzaffarpur where at least 34 minor girls were drugged, tortured and raped - rubbed shoulders with the who's who of Bihar, sources said. In 2005, when Nitish Kumar became chief minister, he had gone to Muzaffarpur to take part in the birthday...

-Outlook The collection of separate figures for suicides of farmers and farm labour has started in 2014, the year in which there were 5650 farmers committed suicides as against 6710 cases of farm labour suicides. According to the latest figures released by the Government, farmer suicides in 2016 have come down to 6351 from 8007 in 2015, a drop of 21 per cent.  Suicides among agricultural labourers, however, have gone up by...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Poor implementation of welfare schemes by the Delhi Government allowed for conditions in which three sisters - Mansi, 8, Shikha, 4, and Parul, 2 - died of starvation in the national capital last month, a fact-finding report by a group of six activists has found. The team that included Harsh Mander, a former bureaucrat and special commissioner to the Supreme Court for Right to Food cases, found that...