-The Times of India Manisha Verma, principal secretary, tribal development department, Maharashtra talks to Sugandha Indulkar about The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 and related issues, with today being World Tribal Day. * What’s the precise positioning of the tribal welfare departments at the Centre and states on FRA? This is a seminal legislation. The preamble to the Act itself states that it aims...

-The Indian Express Bill to promote altruistic surrogacy gives short shrift to women’s agency. The Lok Sabha passed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2019 on Tuesday. The Billl aims to regulate the practice of surrogacy in India and allow only “ethical altruistic surrogacy”. The Bill was first introduced in the lower house in November 2016, then referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare. It was introduced and passed...

-ThePrint.in Despite being ruled by BJP for the longest time, Hindi belt states lag far behind Jammu & Kashmir on education and various other indicators. There is no doubt that the Narendra Modi government’s decision to remove special rights for Jammu and Kashmir’s administration and to convert the state into two Union Territories is ideological and political. The removal of Articles 370 and 35A has been a lynchpin of the BJP’s political...

-Hindustan Times The changes empower the government to designate individuals as terrorists, merely if it believes so On August 8, 2019, the President assented to amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), 1967, introducing a set of changes to an already draconian law. The most fundamental of these changes empowers the government to designate individuals as terrorists, merely if it believes so, leaving little to no recourse for them to protest...

-The Indian Express The new report on ‘Climate Change and Land’, released on Thursday afternoon, is second in the series of special focused reports that IPCC has been preparing on the specific request of governments and other organisations. Pune: Agriculture and associated land activities related to food production could be contributing over a quarter of the global emissions of greenhouse gases, a new major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...