-Hindustan Times From a constitutional point of view, the scheme fails the tests of rationality and non-arbitrariness Earlier this month, the Supreme Court indicated that it would hear the long-pending constitutional challenge to the electoral bonds scheme. The electoral bonds scheme, which was introduced by the government in early 2018, provides new channels for private funding of political parties, and has been subjected to severe criticism, including by a former Chief Election...

-Down to Earth Gourd has sculpted the culture and traditions of rural India for ages A mellifluous tune breaks the silence as I trudge through a forested hill in the Baiga heartland of Dindori district in Madhya Pradesh. At places the music fuses with the gurgling sound of Burner, a tributary of the Narmada river, and becomes even more enchanting. Entranced, I start following the melody and reach a hut where...

-The Indian Express Agrarian crisis is an opportunity, for the government that assumes office after elections, to enact a law giving farmers the right to sell any quantity of their produce to anybody, anywhere and at any time. The German obsession with sound currency has been conditioned by the collective memory of the Great Hyperinflation of 1922-23, just as American intolerance to double-digit unemployment and stock market crashes is traceable to...

-The Indian Express Laws like Official Secrets Act conflate the interests of particular parties, governments with the greater good. They must be contested. The greatest failing of Indian public life over the past 70 years is the manner in which the state and forms of government have become identified with the life of the people. We have come to believe that state and society are the same thing and that pronouncements...

-The Indian Express There are at least six parliamentary constituencies — Krishnanagar, Ranaghat, Barrackpore, Barasat, Bongaon and Coochbehar — where the Vaishnavite sect has the numbers to swing results. When 100-year-old Binapani Debi was declared dead at 8.52 pm on Tuesday evening at SSKM Hospital in Kolkata, Mamata Banerjee was among the first to reach the hospital. With Trinamool MP and Debi’s daughter-in-law Mamatabala Thakur by her side, the Chief Minister...