The Law Commission recommends making Section 498A, IPC, compoundable, and women's groups say that would affect women's interests. A REPORT of the Law Commission of India on “Compounding of (IPC) Offences” suggesting that Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code, which prescribes punishment for a husband or his relatives for subjecting a woman to cruelty, be made compoundable with the permission of the court, is fraught with several implications. The report...

Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), in effect since April 2010, was a much debated piece of legislation, which, not surprisingly, came under attack from various quarters. Proponents of ‘low-cost’ private schools felt that it imposed an unnecessary burden in terms of infrastructural norms on schools.  Since 2010, Assessment Survey Evaluation Research (Aser) has reported compliance on many RTE norms, such as those related to school...

-The Financial Express   Bhim can't understand what he's done wrong.   Before dawn every day he joins hundreds of wholesale traders at Delhi's Azadpur Mandi, a sprawling, chaotic market where trucks blare Bollywood music, porters haul huge brown sacks of fruit and vegetables and hawkers ply tea and cigarettes. His own trade is in rosy red apples, laced with calcium carbide. Bhim says he's been adding chemicals to his apples for years to artificially ripen...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...