-The Business Standard   Higher judiciary has not addressed the delays in India's courts Continuing what will be a year of quick personnel changes for the higher judiciary, a new chief justice of India, R M Lodha, has taken office. Justice Lodha will have only a five-month tenure. It will be difficult for him to introduce any far-reaching reform in this period. His initial speech after being sworn in must have been written...

-The Hindu Long list of agents against free expression Censorship across the country is on the rise with as many as 52 instances being recorded in the first quarter of 2014. Releasing data on censorship for the first three months of this year, media watch group, The Hoot, said this averaged a little less than one a day. The agents against free expression were not just the state or fringe groups. The...

-The Hindustan Times India has driven the truck of development - loaded with tar, bricks, glass, concrete...the works - right through its most treasured and fragile green spaces in the last decade. While major cities like Delhi and Mumbai sacrificed green cover for real estate, the country's finest wildlife corridors have been ceded to indiscriminate industrialisation. In the absence of a clear policy to balance development and environment, the Aravallis in Gurgaon,...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Consumers can soon engage a non-advocate or an NGO to fight their case in consumer forums. However, such agents can't charge arbitrary fees. The charges will be decided by presidents of the relevant forums. The grounds to be considered while deciding fees will include the paying capacity of clients, skill of the agent and complexity of the case. In a recent notification, the consumer affairs ministry...

-The Indian Express The gangrape may have brought the tribal councils of this West Bengal district to notoriety, but it wasn't the first sexual abuse on their orders. What is more at play here though is growing outside interference in a region considered a vote bank, writes Madhuparna Das. On January 29 evening, 900 people of a village in Birbhum district's Labhpur block gathered near the hut of their headman. The hut,...