-The Indian Express On the ground, SC ruling on Section 66A is frequently violated. In October 2018, we published a small study revealing how Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act 2000 [“IT Act”] continued to be used to prosecute persons despite being struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in Shreya Singhal (2015). We suggested that this afterlife was not merely wanton exercise of power by the police but...

  The budgetary allocation for Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as a proportion of total budgetary expenditure has been reduced marginally during the Interim Budget 2019-20. It may have happened because the coverage of gross cropped area under the scheme could not keep pace with the target that was set during the last two years. The Status of Implementation of Budget Announcements 2017-18, which was presented during the Union Budget 2018-19,...

-Livemint.com India is increasingly jailing its young for online posts that ‘offend’ politicians. The impact on their lives and families is devastating Initially, they all thought it was a joke when the police turned up. Once the prison gates opened, reality sunk in. Entering the dark, stinking cells, filled with dangerous looking strangers, they all felt a mix of emotions. There was of course incomprehension, fear, and an unexplainable feeling of guilt...

-The Hindu Outgoing Central Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu flags the impact of growing vacancies in the Commission Central Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu, who took on the Prime Minister’s Office and the Reserve Bank of India in a case dealing with the non-disclosure of wilful defaulters of major bank loans, warned on his last day hearing RTI appeals that by December, he and three other CICs would retire, leaving the Central Information Commission...

-The Indian Express The low training participation was mostly due to financial barriers and time constraints, with each category cited by a third of youth respondents. Seventy per cent of youth are unaware of government-run skill development programmes in their area, yet more than seventy per cent are very interested in pursuing skills training, according to a “Young India and Work” study by the Observer Research Foundation and World Economic Forum. The findings,...