-Economic and Political Weekly Farmers' unions and political parties have been demanding the implementation of the Swaminathan minimum support price (cost plus 50%) to address agrarian crisis and farmers' distress. But they have not raised demands for the implementation of the recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers, which have the potential to provide lasting solutions. Ranjit Singh Ghuman (ghumanrs@yahoo.co.uk) is a Nehru SAIL Chair Professor, Centre for Research in Rural and...

-The Hindu Legal researcher Usha Ramanathan speaks about the the modified draft Bill which continues to raise several critical concerns relating to privacy, ethical usage of DNA samples and DNA database. This week, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) uploaded a slightly modified draft of the Human DNA Profiling Bill on its website, opening up the controversial Bill, now tabled in Parliament, for public scrutiny. Legal researcher Usha Ramanathan, a member of the Committee...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Law minister Sadananda Gowda said on Friday the ambitious e-courts project is successfully running in 13,000 courts across the country where details of 4.76 crore pending and decided cases are available online. More than one crore judgments are already online and there is constant updating of records where all past judgments would be made available. The Cabinet has given its consent to initiate phase-II of the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Election Commission has suspended its five-month-old project to clean the electoral rolls by linking and authenticating voter I-card details with Aadhaar data, days after the Supreme Court ruled that the unique identification number could be used only for PDS and LPG distribution schemes. "All further activities relating to collection/feeding/seeding of Aadhaar number being undertaken under the National Electoral Rolls Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) shall...

-The Indian Express The challenge to the Aadhaar project is, of course, much more than privacy. Much, much more.  The three-judge bench of the Supreme Court hearing the cases challenging the UID/Aadhaar project has decided that there “appears to be certain amount of apparent unresolved contradiction in the law declared by this Court” in relation to privacy as a fundamental right. It worries the court that reading the 1954 judgment in MP Sharma’s...