-The Indian Express Preventive detention is being routinised as an instrument of state repression The recent preventive detention (PD) of Khurram Parvez, a Kashmiri human rights activist, and Jignesh Mewani, a Dalit leader from Gujarat, has turned the spotlight on the provision of PD and the purposes it is being made to serve. National Crime Records Bureau data released in September 2015 indicate that over 3,200 people were being held in administrative...

-The Indian Express But they can’t make up their minds whether to farm, sell or give up their land to industry. Kolkata: Days after the Supreme Court judgment striking down the acquisition of land for Tata Motors’ car factory in Singur, the government is trying to prepare 997-acre plot for return to its original owners. But with the land’s agricultural potential still under a question mark, Agriculture Minister Purnendu Bose said...

-The Indian Express Government has the opportunity to rein in food inflation on a sustainable basis. In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi counted his government’s achievements. Bringing down inflation from double digits to below six per cent was emphatically mentioned as one that brought relief to the aam aadmi. Without doubt, we witnessed moderation in the overall consumer price index (CPI) and wholesale price index (WPI) levels in the past...

-The Indian Express A Pulses Revolution is possible even in the most backward districts, as a PPP project in Bundelkhand has shown. Damoh (Madhya Pradesh): Zahim Khan has two major worries, as he surveys the urad (black gram) crop on 14 out of the 20-acres land being jointly cultivated by him with 13 other farmers. The immediate concern is rains. Damoh district in Madhya Pradesh’s Bundelkhand region, of which his village Somkheda is...

-The Indian Express The current bill does not take into account any of the criticism voiced against an earlier version, proposed under the UPA government in 2013; it continues to ignore the Forest Rights Act. A recent controversial bill that outlines a framework for the utilisation of compensatory afforestation funds is being strongly contested and challenged by civil society actors. It raises important questions that are fundamentally connected to forests: Whose...