-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Justifying retention of penal provision of Section 66A of Information Technology Act for posting offensive material on social networking sites, the Centre on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that reach and impact of internet was wider and the level of restriction on this medium should be higher in comparison to print and television. Unlike print and electronic media, the web did not exist and operate in...

-Down to Earth Land devoted to non-agricultural use has increased three-fold since Independence. It is set to increase further and faster, according to this article extracted from the latest State of India's Environment report, published by Down To Earth and Centre for Science and Environment In 2014, India was expected to bring down widespread land conflicts. This is because the country got a new land acquisition law in November 2013 after more...

Quite opposite to the top-down model of budgeting, the newly elected Aam Aadmi Party-led Government in Delhi has decided to go for a 'citizen-centric' budget planning at 'mohalla'-level for the fiscal year 2015-16. Drawing lessons from the success stories of participatory budgeting conducted at municipal-level in cities like Porto Alegre (Brazil), the AAP-led Delhi Government has decided to launch this form of decentralized budgeting on a pilot basis in a...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Amendments proposed by the previous Congress-led union government to the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996 had the potential of improving upon this progressive legislation. Unfortunately, with its successor pursuing different priorities, the possibility of the amendments being passed remains rather low. Kamal Nayan Choubey (kamalnayanchoubey@gmail.com) is with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. A bill for an amendment to the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas)...

-The Hindu The Draft National Health Policy 2015 fails to tackle head-on the core problem of the Indian health system: its management, administration and overall governance structure The Draft National Health Policy of 2015 released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, is a comprehensive document. So comprehensive, in fact, that it says too little by saying too much. A National Heath Policy is commonly read as a...