-The Hindu Verma panel recommended fixing responsibility on superior officers The Centre has not accepted the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee regarding punishment to government servants, particularly police and army personnel, involved in acts of crime against women. The ordinance, cleared by the Union Cabinet on Friday, aims at making changes in various sections of the Indian Penal Code dealing with crime against women. For instance, the three-member panel had suggested changes in...

-The Hindu The ordinance on sexual assault cleared by the Union Cabinet and signed into law on Sunday by the President is problematic, not in what it seeks to achieve, but in what it does not attempt to redress. If this is all that the government intends to do on the basis of the Justice Verma Committee report, then, quite worryingly, the nationwide protests and expressions of outrage at rape and...

-The Indian Express On the Delhi rape case, let’s keep the indignation, disturb legislative slumbers The Verma Committee Report (VCR) speaks against civil society and political rape cultures. The poignancy and urgency of the VCR owes much to the experience of conversing with rape survivors and traumatised children. A precious message of the VCR is this: one may not take law reform seriously without taking human and social suffering equally seriously. The committee...

-The Times of India Sociologist Ashis Nandy's controversial words at the Jaipur lit fest are being debated heatedly but there is one thing that is difficult to argue with: there is a lack of representation from the backward classes and tribals in the upper echelons of power in West Bengal. Over the last 100 years, he said, "nobody from the other backward classes (OBCs), the backward classes, the scheduled castes and...

-IANS LUCKNOW: With security often seen as a status symbol, the Uttar Pradesh government is spending a whopping Rs 120 crores of public money a year to provide security cover to around 1,500 VIPs of different hues, deploying as many as 2,913 police officials, officials records show. Inspector general of police (Law & Order) Badri Prasad Singh admitted that 1,476 VIPs (very important persons) were being given security based on "pre-emptive threat...