-The Telegraph Kolkata: The Mamata Banerjee government has decided to return nearly 10,000 acres from its land bank to 30,000-odd original owners by the end of the year with an eye on electoral gains, officials said. No one in the government would go on record but The Telegraph has seen a land and land reforms department order, sent to the departments holding the plots and the district authorities, to start the land-return...

-Live Mint Electoral Reforms are not the forte of law ministers. But they can avoid damaging a battered system The resignation of Ashwani Kumar as law minister has brought cheer to a group of people who do not have much to do, at least directly, with the coal block allocation controversy. These are people working on Electoral Reforms. This is because ever since becoming law minister, Kumar had been consistent in his...

-The Hindu The representatives of the recognised national and State-level political parties on Friday expressed satisfaction over the functioning of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), developed by the Election Commission (EC) and made some suggestions for further improvement. The Commission said "the suggestions will be considered by the Expert Committee and the EC." Informed sources said the improved VVPAT could possibly be used for field...

-The Hindu   Top civil society bodies are challenging the government's ‘counter-affidavit' in the Paid News case which seeks to gut the Election Commission's powers In a major twist to the Ashok Chavan vs. Madhav Kinhalkar legal battle (more notorious as the "Paid News" scandal), leading civil society organisations and eminent individuals have approached the Supreme Court to implead themselves into the case. Their intervention application, moved by advocate Prashant Bhushan, minces no words...

-The Hindu   A concern about the Food Security Bill is that legal entitlement has been weakened to mean a passive right to receive whatever the state gives The hallmark of the National Food Security Bill 2011 is that if implemented it will translate into India's first ever right to food legislation, guaranteeing food as a justiciable, legal entitlement to its people. However, in its current form, the Bill fails to evolve a...