-Business Standard Factories with up to 300 workers can fire without government approval After failing to get the Centre’s approval to the ordinance route, the Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Wednesday passed a single Bill to amend eight major labour laws; seven other laws would be changed through compounding provisions, etc. With this, Madhya Pradesh became the third state in a year, after Rajasthan and Gujarat, to pass its own labour law amendments...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The NDA government on Thursday cited a six-decade old ruling of the Supreme Court to argue that citizens could not claim right to privacy as a fundamental right, a stand which could raise the hackles of civil rights groups. The argument, advanced by attorney general Mukul Rohatgi, ran contrary to many post-Emergency judgments of the Supreme Court expanding the right to life, guaranteed under Article 21...

A long-pending demand of civil society activists and NGOs, who are campaigning for probity, accountability, and transparency in public life, is going to be fulfilled soon. A welcome move has been made by the Government to enumerate and publish data on crimes committed against media persons, Right to Information activists, and whistleblowers in the forthcoming edition of Crime in India, which is published annually by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)...

-The Indian Express One of the criticisms of the proposed amendment is that it could, in one stroke, legalise the illegal detention of thousands of underage children by policemen across the country. As a potentially chaotic Rajya Sabha attempts to take up the contentious Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Bill 2015 — passed by the Lok Sabha and listed for the Rajya Sabha Wednesday — a number of legal...

-Frontline Odisha shows the way in the implementation of the ICDS scheme to ensure that children receive nutrition and care in their earliest years, but the Centre’s moves to slash budgetary allocations could wreak havoc on such programmes. At the Tasarda anganwadi centre in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, as the auxiliary nurse and midwife (ANM) pulled out the blood pressure (BP) instrument to check a pregnant woman, the children at the anganwadi began...