-The Hindu A look at how the RTI Act has been systematicallyassaulted by successive governments to blunt its efficacy and make governance less transparent For 24 years, until the enactment of the Right to Information Act (RTI) in 2005, Shivaji Raut was an ordinary teacher, the vice-principal of Anant English Medium School in Satara district in western Maharashtra. But when he discovered the power of RTI in demanding accountability and transparency from...

-Scroll.in Attention came to be fixed on protestors hurling flags on top of the Red Fort, eclipsing scenes of Delhi residents welcoming farmers to the city. When the first wave of tractors triumphantly drove down the national highway north of Delhi around 9 am on January 26, the most conspicuous symbol was the Indian tricolour. It dominated all other flags – the saffron-coloured Nishan Sahib, the flag of the Sikh Khalsa Panth,...

-Hindustan Times The farmers want to take out the rally on Outer Ring Road, while the police have suggested alternate routes. With protesting farmers refusing to budge from their decision to take out a tractor rally on Republic Day, the administration has geared up to stop them. Hindustan Times' sister publication Livehindustan reported that Uttar Pradesh government has asked supply officers in all the districts to not give diesel to protesting farmers. Thousands...

-Scroll.in The author of the forthcoming ‘The Great Gender Divergence’ on how agriculture can explain why some parts of India are more gender-equal than others. Dr Alice Evans is a lecturer at King’s College London and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Centre for International Development. Taking inspiration from research on the great divergence – the idea that Western Europe saw tremendous socioeconomic shifts in the 19th century that led to industrial growth...

-Down to Earth Bihar reported the highest prevalence of the disease   A higher proportion of children under the age of five in the villages had diarrhoea than their counterparts in the cities in 17 of the 22 Indian states and Union territories (UT) covered by the 2019-2020 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5). This urban-rural gap was significant in Maharastra — in the two weeks prior to the survey, 6.6 per cent children...