-The Indian Express Demonetisation politics unfolds as a vast morality play. Its imagination unleashes the state on you, in the name of protecting your own virtue. The so-called demonetisation is a watershed event for India. It signifies the arrival of a new kind of politics that will redefine the relationship between citizen and state. The scale of this event is so unprecedented that we are struggling to see where all the chips...

-BBC Four years ago, a group of upper-caste men arrived at Mehul Vinodbhai Kabira's modest two-room home in Gujarat and threatened to burn it down. Bhayla is a nondescript village of around 450 low slung brick-and-cement homes straddling a highway dotted by pharmaceutical, engineering and bio-tech factories. Most of the homes in this dense village are owned by land-owning upper castes, but around 70 belong to Dalits (formerly known as untouchables) like Mr...

-Business Standard While allocations to several social sector schemes have been increased, concerns about the direction of the funds being ploughed remain The health and education sectors have trudged along the last two years awaiting direction that would be set through new policies the National Democratic Alliance government promised. In the absence of these guiding documents, most observers have been left to read the intermittent policy decisions like tea-leaves to guess the...

-The Indian Express While the Home Ministry has decided to put grants from US-based Ford Foundation under the “prior approval category” and also on its watch list in the interest of “national security”, some government-backed educational and research institutes that receive grants from the Foundation have said the US-based organisation helped build institutions in India. Among the beneficiaries of such grants are at least 10 that are also funded and supported by...

-The Indian Express The debate over the land acquisition bill is increasingly marked by political tone deafness and legislative hubris. The government has offered minor amendments. But most of them are designed to display its consistent ability to be too clever by half rather than its ability to address deep issues. The 2013 bill had been framed in the context of several issues. The now much-maligned Land Acquisition Act of 1894...