-Down to Earth The BJP-led government's change of heart for big-ticket rural programmes says a lot about its dwindling political fortune India's current political season has a nostalgic tint. Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi has apparently met party leaders to kickstart a campaign against the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’S) overt efforts to softly kill the erstwhile government’s flagship programmes. Particularly, the NDA government’s political decisions to not pursue the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

-The Hindu Economic agency is one of the most enabling elements to release women from oppression, violence and powerlessness. A Supreme Court Bench has once again proved that our judiciary can be the torchbearer of progressive attitudes towards women. In 2013, the Justice J.S. Verma Committee, while responding to the horrific December 16, 2012 gang rape in Delhi, prepared a report that drew from the observations of members of the women’s movement among...

-The Indian Express If the government does not have the will to regulate 55,000 pre-natal diagnostic clinics, how will it track 29 million pregnancies annually? I was inspired by Maneka Gandhi’s struggle to get back her passport (impounded by the Janata Party government) as an IIT student in 1977. Her Supreme Court case led to a landmark judgment on personal liberty. Subsequently Gandhi filed petitions in courts to protect animal Rights....

-The Hindu Students who are a part of the ‘Happy to Bleed’ campaign has asked the Supreme Court why the healthy biological process of menstruation is used in the name of religion to discriminate against women. A Special Bench led by Justice Dipak Misra, which is hearing the Sabarimala temple entry issue, will consider the intervention application. The students want the apex court to address and decide on whether modern society should...

-The Hindu To liberate crores of children, transgenders and others trapped in human trafficking, beggary or any such forms of forced labour, the Union government has proposed a major revamp of the rehabilitation scheme for rescued bonded workers, raising aid from the present Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 3 lakh. The government has finalised a proposal to institute a three-tier rehabilitation funding scheme, under which a rescued transgender or disabled person will get...