-The Hindu The steps taken towards social democracy are being reversed. What we have now are social insurance policies from above. This subverts the entire project of giving voice to the voiceless. India has paid a heavy price for failing to institutionalise social democracy It is generally agreed that theories of social democracy, in comparison to theories of formal political democracy, take cognisance of background inequalities that hamper the realisation of basic...

-Business Standard As many as 47 sedition cases were reported in 2014 across nine states, according to the National Crime Records Bureau The 156-year-old colonial-era sedition law, used against arrested Kanhaiya Kumar, president of the students' union, Jawaharlal Nehru University, has been discarded by the UK (where punishment once included chopping ears), South Korea and Indonesia. Kumar was sent to judicial custody for 14 days, amid violence within and outside a Delhi court...

-The Hindu The ruling party is doing its best to establish that being critical of its government is tantamount to being anti-national. It is not just the inconvenient person or collective being intimidated; the Constitution is under attack. “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — George Orwell The controlled voice of Ravish Kumar on a blackened screen and his stark report on NDTV India on February 19...

-The Indian Express Never before has India’s agricultural science community been as demoralised as now Everyone knows Indian agriculture is in deep crisis, impacting around 115 million farmers and an equal number of landless cultivators. Two consecutive bad monsoons and falling commodity prices have resulted in the imports of edible oils and pulses touching all-time-highs, even as its exports of agri-products — from basmati rice, soya meal, sugar, milk powder and...

-The Indian Express The budget recognises the crisis in rural India, but allocations do not match the talk In India now, there appears to be an inverse relationship between the time finance ministers spend talking about a particular issue in their budget speeches and the amount of money they actually allocate to deal with it. This was true of former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s budget speeches, but incumbent FM Arun Jaitley...