-The Hindu Supreme Court issues notice to Centre on the petition by a law student The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre to respond to a plea filed by a law student seeking the implementation of the Justice J.S. Verma Committee report on crime against women and children. The court issued notices to the government on a plea by B. Srinivas Goud, represented by advocates Ramaswami Balaji and Shravan Kumar, for...

-United Nations News Around half a billion people work fewer paid hours than they would like, or are not getting enough access to paid work, shows a study published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) on Monday, which also forecasts that unemployment will rise by about 2.5 million this year. After nine years of relatively stable global unemployment, the World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2020 puts the rising jobless numbers down...

-The Hindu Bengaluru: The NITI Aayog proposal to hand over district hospitals with 750 beds to private medical colleges, citing the public-private-partnership (PPP) arrangements in Karnataka and Gujarat, has come under severe criticism from health activists and doctors, who feel it will further compromise quality and access to healthcare, mainly for the poor. They have demanded that the move be dropped without further consultation. The Centre’s top think tank recently released for...

-The Hindu Rue the use of unaccounted money in next month’s Assembly elections New Delhi: Activists working for electoral reforms said they were disappointed on Monday when the Supreme Court declined to stay the electoral bond scheme of the government, saying that the anonymous donations to political parties through these bonds could continue for the Delhi Assembly elections next month. A founder of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which had filed a...

-Livemint.com The government’s inordinately large food stockpiles have resulted in an artificial market scarcity On 7 January, the ministry of statistics released India’s advance estimates of national income for 2019-20, pegging the economy’s growth rate this financial year at 5%. Based on data available for the first two quarters, this seems an overestimate. Most indicators suggest that actual growth may be lower than 5%. This is bad news, especially since there is...