-TheWire.in The MGNREGA website used to be something of a gold standard on information dissemination. But not anymore. Sanjay Sahni is an anti-corruption activist from Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Formally educated only till Class 5, he used to work as an electrician in Delhi until 2012. He came across the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) website by chance, and after several hours of navigating through the complicated web pages, he saw...

-The Times of India AHMEDABAD: The answer of the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) to an RTI (Right to Information) query has revealed a shocker: Gujarat recorded 55 custodial deaths in 2017. Ahmedabad city topped the chart with 15 deaths in custody — two in police custody and 13 at the Sabarmati central jail. The RTI application — filed by a human Rights activist from Mehsana, Kaushik Parmar — also revealed that...

-Scroll.in First it refused to make consent of forest dwellers mandatory for growing plantations on their lands, now it breaks the promise of even consulting them. The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has drafted new rules that dilute the Rights of Adivasis and other forest dwellers to independently decide how their traditional forestlands are used. The new rules, formulated in February, give the forest bureaucracy across the country the power...

-Hindustan Times Both, the farmers who undertook the march and those who went on strike, represent the wide spectrum of the state’s ongoing agrarian and rural distress. Last year, on June 1, thousands of farmers in Maharashtra went on an unprecedented strike, refusing to sell their produce to markets and cutting off supply of daily necessities – milk, vegetables and fruits – to cities. The two-day strike forced the Devendra Fadnavis-led...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Tuesday's Supreme Court order extending the Aadhaar-linking deadline indefinitely came after activist-lawyer Vrinda Grover had rushed in and challenged the authorities' decision to cancel her passport for not possessing an Aadhaar card. The five-judge bench was in the middle of a scheduled hearing of public interest petitions against Aadhaar's constitutionality. Grover said through senior advocate Arvind Datar that she had gone to the passport authorities here for the issuance...