-IndiaSpend/ Hindustan Times Mumbai’s high malnutrition figures are despite the fact that 83% of government and aided schools in Mumbai city and 95.1% in its suburbs have a midday meal programme. Mumbai’s Colaba is well known for its art deco buildings, the Gateway of India, swish pubs and restaurants, and the pleasant promenade of Marine Drive. It houses the state assembly, Vidhan Bhavan, and the state secretariat, Mantralaya. However, this high-profile ward recorded...

-Livemint.com A cow cess of even Re.1 per litre of petrol will be enough to generate funds that will exceed the entire annual budgets of several Union ministries About two weeks ago, Subramanian Swamy, a Rajya Sabha member from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called for a cow cess of Re1 on petrol to fund gaushalas or cow shelters across the country. Swamy made the comment towards the end of his speech...

-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...

-TheWire.in Legislative action that primarily looks at cattle mobility as ‘acts of smuggling cattle out of state for slaughter’ is deeply misguided and betrays a misunderstanding of how India’s cattle have been bought and sold since the British Raj. Like many poorly drafted laws, the recently notified Livestock Markets (Regulation) Rules is so pre-occupied with its self-righteousness that it fails to realise the harm that it would cause. If the colonial era’s...

-Observer Research Foundation The Modi government needs to urgently revisit the opaque and draconian cattle trade rules. n the wake of a number of well-publicised incidents of lynching and mob violence, most of them related to issues surrounding cattle trade or beef consumption, a narrative — Lynchistan — has taken hold that there’s been a spike in the incidents of lynchings and mob violence. In one telling, such violence has increased after...