-Reuters India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance programme that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said. The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive US digital snooping beyond American...

-The Indian Express Trendsetters & tweakers Act one Chhattisgarh already has a food security law in place. It became last December the first state to pass a food security bill, which covers several sections not under existing schemes. The Act makes food entitlement a right and depriving anyone of that an offence. If PDS grains, for instance, are being diverted, the officials involved will face penal provisions. The Act also seeks to empower women...

-The Hindustan Times The audacious ambush and bloody massacre of more than two dozen political leaders and their security guards in Darbha valley of Sukma district in south Chhattisgarh, raises again profoundly important questions about the legitimacy of violence as an instrument to battle injustice and oppression. Resistance to injustice is widely endorsed as the highest human duty in most cultures, but the debate is about the legitimacy of deploying violence in...

-The Economic Times If India is now debating opening the books and operations of political parties to the public, it's because of these six people who pulled strategic levers and applied relentless pressure. Soma Banerjee traces a four-year effort that converted intent to action Balwant Singh Khera, a politician from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, is not a name that will strike a chord in mainstream politics or social discourse today. It might in...

-The Telegraph The SR Hashim committee, formed in 2010 to help identify the urban poor, has suggested criteria to automatically count in and count out households from the poverty list and assign scores to the rest. According to the recommendations, ownership of computer with an Internet connection will exclude a household from the poverty list. The report has been submitted to the housing and urban poverty alleviation ministry. Sources in the ministry described...