-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Amid demands from women organisations and activists to make marital rape a criminal offence, the Delhi high court on Monday asked the Centre to spell out its stand on the contentious issue. A bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and justice Jayant Nath asked the Centre to respond to a petition seeking to declare Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) as unconstitutional as it discriminates against...

-The Hindu Business Line Electoral Trusts bring some transparency to India Inc’s donations to parties, but more needs to be done New Delhi: India Inc makes big donations to political parties, but very little is made public on the amount or to whom it is given. Electoral Trusts revealing such data were expected to bring in more transparency. A change in income-tax rules in January 2013 paved the way for the setting up...

-The Hindu We need to apply a new credo, digital dynamism, that recognises the complex web that is the internet today An unseasonably warm new year has been substituted by a densely spewing fog over the concept of net neutrality. Net neutrality is a specific approach to the economic regulation of the internet. It is based on the premise of the ‘end to end design principle’, in which traffic on the internet is...

-The Indian Express The Labour Ministry’s four-year-old report acknowledged that for women, decent maternity leave alone “results in mounting a very huge pressure of family, childcare responsibilities as well as demands of workplace”. The Labour Ministry, on the recommendation of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, will amend the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, to increase maternity leave in the private sector from 12 weeks to 26. This is being done...

-The Hindu Business Line The mythology of free trade being a force for economic progress remains entrenched in world politics Globalisation has created a unique spectator sport, where political dignitaries periodically gather at carefully chosen venues for days of deliberation over humanity’s most consequential problems. It is a spectacle at which ‘civil society’ — as the new force in world politics is called — is granted a tent of its own, financed...