-Business Standard Also for other programme impacting the non-urban economy, in the wake of two years of partial drought The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) seems likely to get its highest budgetary allocation since its launch a decade before. This allocation for 2016-17 could cross the previous highs of Rs 40,100 crore in the 2010-11 Budget and Rs 40,000 crore in 2011-12, by then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee. Actual spending...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Amid demands from women organisations and activists to make marital rape a criminal offence, the Delhi high court on Monday asked the Centre to spell out its stand on the contentious issue. A bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and justice Jayant Nath asked the Centre to respond to a petition seeking to declare Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) as unconstitutional as it discriminates against...

-The Indian Express The Labour Ministry’s four-year-old report acknowledged that for women, decent maternity leave alone “results in mounting a very huge pressure of family, childcare responsibilities as well as demands of workplace”. The Labour Ministry, on the recommendation of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, will amend the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, to increase maternity leave in the private sector from 12 weeks to 26. This is being done...

-The Hindu Business Line The mythology of free trade being a force for economic progress remains entrenched in world politics Globalisation has created a unique spectator sport, where political dignitaries periodically gather at carefully chosen venues for days of deliberation over humanity’s most consequential problems. It is a spectacle at which ‘civil society’ — as the new force in world politics is called — is granted a tent of its own, financed...

-The Hindu When the going gets tough, public investment must be stepped up to pump-prime a slow-moving economy facing uncertain headwinds of low commodity prices and faltering international trade. When the going is good, the private sector would also have a role to play, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said, vowing to ramp up infrastructure investments in 2016-17. Ten months ago, in his first Budget for a full financial year, Mr....