-The Indian Express First-of-its-kind report provides 360-degree view of the administration of Capital punishment — who gets it, and what it is to live in death’s shadow. Reason and scope of Study The National Law University’s Death Penalty Research Project has prepared a socio-economic profile of prisoners sentenced to death in India, using statistics and case studies, to help create a resource for an in-depth understanding of the administration of the death penalty...

-The Hindu The Finance Minister’s prescriptions are a classic case of being unable to see the wood for the trees, be it on the tax proposals, the rural outreach or the bank bailout. It was a marathon achievement: 12,187 words in 111 minutes. True, there were no interruptions; the Finance Minister virtually sent the House to sleep. I have listened to many Budget speeches; and I cannot say that Dr. Manmohan Singh...

-Hindustan Times The Chennai floods have thrown up some fundamental flaws in our system of urban planning. Across India, city after city has experienced floods, while some others live with the fear of impending disasters. In Mumbai, flooding was caused by wrong developments at the Bandra estuary and negligence along the Mithi river, and in Uttarakhand the disaster was caused by unplanned regional development and the unholy nexus between the land...

-The Indian Express A major challenge would be coordinating with different agencies, many of which claimed they were in the dark. While the Delhi government introduced a slew of radical measures to curb the capital’s soaring pollution levels, there is still a long way to go before these can be successfully implemented. A major challenge would be coordinating with different agencies, many of which claimed they were in the dark. -...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: About one -third of all mercy petitions in Independent India have been commuted to life imprisonment with a new report stating that 3534 of 5106 petitions were rejected while 1572 were considered favourably. This is the first such estimate of mercy petitions filed since Independence and is based on several sources accessed by the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) in its report Status of Mercy...