-Economic and Political Weekly Strict implementation of NHRC guidelines for investigation into fake “encounters” is a must. The killing of five suspected bank robbers in Chennai on 23 February by police officers tasked with apprehending them looks suspiciously like yet another case of a fake “encounter”. News reports following the killing have brought out various inconsistencies in the claim of the police that they fired in self-defence.   After directives from the National Human...

-ANI Sunita Kumari, a twelve year old Dalit girl from Balthar Mod, Jharkhand, a student of class seven, was forced into marriage not once but twice. Her first tie-up was at the age of seven with a mentally challenged person residing in the nearby Siktia village. Soon after the marriage Sunita escaped from the trap and the first thing she did after coming back was to request her mother to let her...

SHEILA DEVI, 54, of Nangal Kalan village in Haryana’s Sonepat district cannot comprehend how Taneja Developers and Infrastructure Ltd (TDI) procured her two-acre plot in 2004, ‘signed’ with thumb impressions of her husband Narender Singh, who died in 2002 and his brother Bhupender, who went missing the next year. The documents are obviously forged. But how did a farmers’ family get cheated in Haryana, where the land acquisition policy formed in...

In Chhattisgarh, people swear by the PDS, which has witnessed a revival since 2004 when the government revamped it. IN Chhattisgarh, as part of the survey on public distribution system (PDS) versus cash transfers, a team of student volunteers visited 12 villages spread across Mahasamund and Sarguja districts. The State may have been in the news for all the wrong reasons in recent times, but the way its PDS worked...

-Live Mint The news that a parliamentary committee has rejected its proposed Bill must come as a jolt to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Reports say that the committee was concerned about duplication with the National Population Register (NPR), the technology, data protection, and the cost. This comes closely on the heels of the home ministry’s contention that UIDAI does not meet the “degree of assurance” required for NPR,...