-The Telegraph Nagpur: The Maharashtra government has given a slew of private companies permission to conduct field trials of genetically modified crops at state agriculture universities' farms, rejecting its dissenting agriculture minister's suggestion for a public debate first. Before this, no Indian state had allowed field trials of GM crops since October last year, when a Supreme Court-appointed expert panel recommended a 10-year moratorium on such trials - though the court has...

-The Indian Express Section 377 reeks of the anxieties of Victorian Britain and Puritan America. In 1982, Michael Hardwick, a gay man, was having consensual sex with a male partner in his bedroom in Atlanta, Georgia. Police officer Keith Torick entered the apartment with a warrant (for public drinking) that had been invalid for three weeks. Admitted by Hardwick's housemate, he went straight to the bedroom. Seeing the men, he announced that...

-The Hindu India's long-standing legacies of caste, gender and class antagonism replicate on campuses as well. As higher education moves forward, it does so on these social cleavages The brutal sexual attack on a young woman in Delhi, in 2012, and a savage attack on a girl student of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on its campus this year are just two examples of extreme violence that have shocked the nation. Acts of...

A new report from Right to Sanitation Campaign in India entitled: In Deep Shit paints a gloomy picture about the position of India's sanitation, and simultaneously draws our attention to the case of ‘missing' and ‘dead' toilets. The report has questioned the claims made by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS) that India is making great strides in availing toilets to its rural population through the Nirmal Bharat...

-The Indian Express Odisha: A December night two desperate men, held captive by a labour contractor, were asked this, and had to make a choice. DEBABRATA MOHANTY reports on the latest victims of Orissa's vicious migration cycle It had been a fortnight that Dialu Niyal and Nilambar Dhangdamajhi had been held captive and subjected to physical and verbal abuse. Nothing though had prepared them for what happened on December 15 night deep...