-The Indian Express India’s disability movement will not be the same again. I wonder if 50 years down the line, India’s disability movement’s timeline will be viewed as before and after Javed Abidi. The unexpected passing away of this colossus a few days back has shaken all — from activists who were his contemporaries to reporters wondering aloud on Twitter about whom to ask for quotes in future coverage of disability. So where...

-Livemint.com Kerala govt’s aim is to build 500 sq. ft houses costing Rs4 lakh each, for which the state has tweaked the centre’s housing programme, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana Bengaluru: Building free houses for all the homeless in Kerala -- more than half-a-million at last count -- is one of the flagship projects of the Communist government. A cabinet meeting held on Tuesday night offers glimpses into the project’s nitty-gritty. The aim...

-The Hindu A Supreme Court Bench will decide whether the law has to be interpreted expansively or in a narrow sense In July 2011, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government embarked on an ambitious project to rewrite the law on land acquisition. How the government acquired land from private parties had long been the subject of heated dispute, often resulting in violent conflict. Several previous governments had made attempts to amend the Land...

-Hindustan Times A newer generation of politicians has again voiced the demand of giving land to landless Dalit households as a means to resolve the crisis of rural livelihoods. But the relentless pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies and liberalisation has rendered most of these demands Utopian Seven decades after Independence, while a majority of farmers cultivate their own land (however small their holdings may be), most Dalit farmers in much of India...

-TheWire.in Environmentalist and water management expert Ravi Chopra says river inter-linking will sow the seeds for future conflicts between states. There is nothing new about the proposed river-interlinking project being pushed by the government, and this ‘unnecessary excess’ of a project will create more problems than it promises to solve, says environmentalist and water management expert, Dr Ravi Chopra, the director of People’s Science Institute, Dehradun and a managing trustee of the...