-The Times of India Asking the government not to keep mercy petitions of death row convicts pending for a long time, Chief Justice of India Altamas Kabir on Sunday said execution of death penalty should not be delayed. He also faulted the government for not informing Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru's family members before he was hanged. "If a death penalty is to be awarded and it is there under the system,...

-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-The Times of India   Nearly one in every six urban Indian residents lives in a slum, newly released Census data shows. The new numbers are significantly lower than the slum growth that had been projected for India. "Our own projections were that the all-India slum population would be 27.5% by 2011, so the new data comes as a pleasant surprise," Arun Kumar Misra, secretary in the ministry of housing and urban poverty...

-The Hindu After the recent gubernatorial changes, as many as 15 of those now ensconced in Raj Bhavans are former civil servants, police officers or Army officers; four of them are ex-IAS officers, eight are former IPS officers, and one is an ex-Army chief. With the appointment of the former Central Bureau of Investigation boss, Ashwani Kumar, and ex-National Security Guards chief Nikhil Kumar as Governors of Nagaland and Kerala last week,...

Introduced in the Lok Sabha in December 2011, the UPA government’s Food Security Bill is finally going to be discussed in the current (Budget) Session of Parliament. The proposed legislation is now slated to see many additional amendments from the government, following criticism from the States, NGOs and diverse stake-holders working on access to food and child health. Attempt here is to summarise in a Q & A format the...