-The Indian Express Vasundhara Raje government will present The Code of Criminal Procedure (Rajasthan Amendment) Bill to replace the ordinance during this Assembly session. The Editors Guild of India has expressed “deep concern” about the Rajasthan Government’s decision to make the Criminal Laws (Rajasthan Amendment) Ordinance 2017 into an Act in the current legislative session. “(It) was ostensibly done to protect the judiciary and the Bureaucracy against false FIRs. But in reality it...

-The Times of India Over a million Ashas and Ushas across the country are restive and angry, but nobody is listening to them. Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) and its urban counterpart known as USHA, are the business end of the gigantic public health apparatus run by the central and state governments. They are in every village, they visit every home, know every mother, every child, and they are the first 'port...

-TheWire.in Legislative action that primarily looks at cattle mobility as ‘acts of smuggling cattle out of state for slaughter’ is deeply misguided and betrays a misunderstanding of how India’s cattle have been bought and sold since the British Raj. Like many poorly drafted laws, the recently notified Livestock Markets (Regulation) Rules is so pre-occupied with its self-righteousness that it fails to realise the harm that it would cause. If the colonial era’s...

-Outlook Policy think-tank Niti Aayog has suggested outsourcing of public services to private hands in order to reduce dependence on the government administrative machinery. It has also recommended induction of specialists into the governance system through lateral entry, a move which, it says, will bring "competition to the established career Bureaucracy". In its draft report on a three-year action agenda made public recently, the Niti Aayog has set a target of full- digitisation...

-Business Standard Not only is your privacy stripped stark naked, the system itself is illegal and vulnerable Indians have serious red tape PTSD. We live with chronic anxiety about the documents that get us the entitlements and paid services we need — food, cooking gas, SIM cards, sale deeds, passports and so on. We’re so tyrannised by Bureaucracy that when we hear of an official document that might simplify life, we fall...