-The Financial Express   With newer varieties and improvement in yield, packaging and marketing, basmati-long hailed as the ‘king of rice'-is spreading its sweet aroma worldwide WALK INTO any supermarket today and the most eye-catching items will be in the section selling packaged rice. Rice, that humble, century-old staple of the Indian diet, has emerged from its traditional image-grains in an open gunny bag-to a slick new avatar. Today, rice, and basmati in...

-The Hindu   The brutal rape and lynching of two girls in Badaun should shock the collective conscience of all Indians, regardless of their class, caste, religious or ethnic background. But does it? A spate of legal reforms following the protests over the December 16, 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman rejected some of the main recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee that were central to combatting sexual violence. These...

-The United Nations   In the aftermath of the global economic crisis, more than 70 per cent of the world population is without proper social protections, the United Nations labour agency today reported, urging governments to scale up investment in child and family benefits, pensions and other public expenditures. "The global community agreed in 1948 that social security and health care for children, working age people who face unemployment or injury and older...

Lokniti - Programme for Comparative Democracy was established in 1997 as a research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. The CSDS is an autonomous social science research institution. Since the inception of the CSDS in 1963, the writings of scholars like Rajni Kothari, D.L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy have become a point of reference for various attempts from the South to question the...

-Live Mint   Despite its importance, reform of India's legal institutions has been seen as a ‘second order' issue India is a young nation long ruled by old laws-its police, for example, are governed by such colonial-era statutes as the Police Act of 1861, which predates independence by nearly a century. And its expanding economy requires forward-looking regulatory mechanisms to foster markets while curbing crony capitalism. India is also a nation that must...