-The Hindu Can India manage with a certain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy? The current situation in Assam seems like a nightmare, a warning about the internal contradictions of democracy. It is a warning that the 19th century ideas of democracy as electoral-ism and the notion of the nation-state as a fetishism of borders may be inappropriate as imaginations for the 21st century. It is a caution...

-TheWire.in The letter by the former Delhi chief justice highlights the dangers of decriminalising the Companies Act, introducing electoral bonds, weakening the RTI Act and not implementing of the Lokpal Act and Whistleblowers Protection Act. New Delhi: In a letter sent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, former chief justice of Delhi high court and noted rights activist A.P. Shah has lamented that “instead of increasing transparency and accountability and making the deterrents...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...

-Hindustan Times The universities need to think of evolving a strategy to hire the best people and offer them attractive salaries to keep them motivated More than half the professorial posts in country’s central universities are vacant. Of the 2,426 sanctioned posts for professors across the central universities, 1,301 have not been filled, reveals data provided by human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar in the Lok Sabha. The lacuna caused by faculty...

-The Tribune Assam is tense; internet services have been suspended and security forces on standby with the final draft list of the controversial NRC out. Sanjoy Hazarika, a specialist on the north-east, explains why it is sitting on a powder keg I’M not getting into the numbers game for Assam and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process which is a draft in progress. The first draft, published last December had 19...