-Newsclick.in In the lack of specific guidelines and a central monitoring mechanism, the process to review forest rights claims has varied across States. With the Modi government abdicating its responsibility of playing a coordinating role in reviewing settlements of claims on forest land, large number of rejections, in many instances above 50%, are being reported from various States. The Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) is yet to set any specific guidelines...

-The Telegraph The court was hearing a joint PIL filed by Anjali Bharadwaj, Col Lokesh Batra and Amrita Johri complaining about the openings resulting in a massive backlog of cases The Supreme Court on Wednesday granted four weeks to the Centre and States to come out with details of vacancies of information commissioners amid complaints that governments across the country are seeking to dilute the transparency law by the keeping the posts...

The recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...

-Livemint.com Amid a bumper wheat crop, India’s farmers sold more wheat to the government than ever before. Government procurement has only grown in recent years, making farmers wary of any attempt to dial back the role of the state in the farm sector This rabi marketing season has seen the highest procurement of wheat by government agencies in history. At 43 million tonnes, this is 33% higher than the average for the...

-The Hindu Underestimation is likely as the CRS is still an imperfect system, with potential sources of error Over the last month, Indian journalists from across the country have accessed and reported on State-level all-cause mortality from the Civil Registration System (CRS), currently confidential and closed to the public. While India’s official death toll from COVID-19 has been suspect from the very beginning — for reasons that are partly institutional and partly...