-Economic and Political Weekly How will the amendments to the Factories Act affect women workers? How do women view the "protections" and night work? Apoorva Kaiwar (akaiwar@yahoo.co.in) is a labour lawyer and consultant on issues of gender and labour. The central government is proposing to amend several labour Laws. The process of amending them has been underway since 2011, which means that it is not only the new dispensation that is eager to...

-The Telegraph In her recent book, Green Wars, the environmental journalist Bahar Dutt, writes: "The editor of a leading media house, everytime I pitched a green story, would invariably complain: ‘Environmentalism is stalling growth; all I am interested in is double-digit growth for this country.'" The idea that environmental protection and economic progress are at odds is widely held among India's elite. It is shared by newspaper editors, economists, businessmen, and, not...

-The Asian Age In India and around the world, poverty is predominantly rural. Development agencies often note that 75 per cent of the world's extremely poor people - those who earn less than $1.25 a day - live in rural areas. New figures from the 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures overlapping dimensions of deprivation, show that rural poverty rates are even higher in some regions. In South Asia, the...

-BBC India's cabinet has approved a bill to allow children over 16 to be tried as adults for crimes like rape and murder. The move follows calls for stricter punishment for juveniles after a 17-year-old was among those convicted of gang rape and murder in Delhi in 2012. At present, juvenile courts can jail those under 18 for at most three years. Under the bill, minors convicted in adult courts would face longer jail...

-The Hindu The gulf between statistics and substance is not easily bridged. The number of rape cases registered in the country may conceal the reality in two significant ways. First, only a small proportion of the rapes are reported at all. Secondly, a significant number of rape cases relate to consensual sex but have been criminalised by circumstances. The Hindu's six-month investigation into cases of sexual assault in Delhi has...