-The Business Standard Defying the Election Committee's suggestion last week, the state announced a two-phase election to be held in April The tug-of-war between the West Bengal government and State Election Commission over Panchayat poll schedule may head for a legal battle, with both sides showing no sign of compromise. After a three-hour long meeting at its office here, the state election commission today refused to accept government-announced panchayat poll dates and sent...

-The Indian Express Kolkata: West Bengal's notification for the panchayat elections marks a flash point in an ongoing tussle between the Mamata Banerjee government and the state election commission. The government notification, issued last week independently of the election authorities, has declared polls in two phases, on April 26 and 30. The election commission, headed by Meera Pandey, has been insisting on three phases. On Monday, the commission wrote to the government...

-The Hindu Even as the Maharashtra government congratulated itself for addressing issues of the transgender population in a draft policy announced earlier this month, one of the provisions of the policy, which states people being transgender can be prevented through medical care, has angered the marginalised community. By this, the government has failed to acknowledge that being transgender is a choice of many people, the community's empathisers say. The draft of the...

-The Hindu   ‘They cannot charge for tuitions but only for extra facilities' Bangalore: A 37-year-old taxi driver, Manjunath Gowda (name changed), had brought a chocolate cake for his family after his six-year-old daughter secured a seat in a sought-after private school in Uttarahalli under a provision of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act 2009, which guarantees 25 per cent of the seats in private unaided schools to...

-DNA Sex workers and women's rights activists have welcomed the government's move to differentiate ‘prostitution' from exploitation in the amended Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code. By inserting a new definition of exploitation, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2013 passed by Lok Sabha clarifies a position that till date conflated consensual adult sex work and sex trafficking: ‘Expression "exploitation" shall include any act of physical exploitation or any form of sexual...