-CaravanMagazine.in Bina Agarwal is a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester, UK. Prior to this, she was the Director and Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. Agarwal has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation. Her best known work is A Field...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Amid demands from women organisations and activists to make marital rape a criminal offence, the Delhi high court on Monday asked the Centre to spell out its stand on the contentious issue. A bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and justice Jayant Nath asked the Centre to respond to a petition seeking to declare Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) as unconstitutional as it discriminates against...

-Frontline The NCRB data used to justify the new law bringing down the age of responsibility for criminal action are open to interpretation. Often the same data can be interpreted in different ways to arrive at contrary conclusions. Portions of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data have been quoted ad nauseam by the government and the media alike to justify the changes made in the juvenile justice law. Experts from the...

-The Indian Express NCRB figures also show that over the last ten years, the juvenile crime rate fluctuated marginally from 1% in 2004-05 to 1.2% in 2008 and down to 1% in 2010. As the government prepares to implement the amended Juvenile Justice Act and consider those above 16 who commit “heinous crimes” as adults, it will do well to revisit its own data for some crucial reminders. Data from the National...

-Outlook Recent studies point to two areas where NREGS has had an impact — rural education and Naxalite conflict. "Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man."  This rather depressing assessment of the field is the opening sentence of Henry Hazlitt's classic primer, Economics in one lesson. In Hazlitt's view, most economists only measure the immediate impact of their policies. A good economist, Hazlitt contended, looks not merely...