-The Indian Express The report recommended specific provisions in the ministry’s version of the transgender Bill, to safeguard their Rights, protect them against discrimination, and provide quotas in government colleges and jobs. The Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has decided to junk the recommendations of a parliamentary committee report which was the first ever government document to recognise the Rights of transgender persons to partnerships and marriage, so that they...

-The Hindu If we oppose every solution to the problem of air pollution, how will we ever breathe clean air, asks the environmentalist Environmentalist Sunita Narain has been fighting for clean air for decades. The Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, with which she has been associated and now serves as director general, led the shift to compressed natural gas in Delhi, to reduce air pollution. Ms. Narain is on the statutory...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare Rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...

-Press release from NREGA Sangharsh Morcha The Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Swaraj Abhiyan in the Supreme Court on the severe drought conditions in the country had drawn the attention of the Court to the inadequate effort of the Central and state governments in implementing the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), amongst other welfare programmes. In its last judgment on issues of MGNREGA workers on 13 May...

-The Indian Express Exclusion and denial of benefits to the poor needs urgent attention The news last month of the starvation death of an 11-year-old girl in the Simdega district in Jharkhand, allegedly because of denial of PDS ration due to Aadhaar linking problems, is appalling. The Aadhaar ecosystem definitely needs to pass a stringent welfare test much more crucially than the privacy test. Aadhaar undeniably has potential, and can perhaps even be...