-The Hindustan Times Stalking — physical or electronic via phone calls, text messages or emails — is now a criminal offence, punishable with one to three years in jail. The provision is part of the law that came into force after President Pranab Mukherjee on February 3 signed an ordinance, which widened the scope and ambit of the Laws dealing with sexual violence against women. The ordinance included a number of recommendations...

The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) has been the target of criticism from industry groups to the Prime Minister for allegedly holding up infrastructure and industrial development through its system of green clearances. But a recent analysis of 5 years of decision-making put out by an environmental group suggests why these attacks might be misplaced, given the ease with which every single of 262 proposed hydropower and irrigation projects...

-The Hindu Thanks to manufactured debates on TV, there is no time for irony and nuance nor are we able to distinguish between a charlatan and an academician Now that the Supreme Court has provided some sort of relief against harassment to Professor Ashis Nandy, it has become incumbent upon all liberal voices to ponder over the processes and arguments that combined to ensure that an eminent scholar had to slink out...

-Counterpunch.org     “The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class.”     BR Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah, 1943, Delhi. I. Arrest. States are clumsy with their enormous power. When it suits the modern state, it uses it immense apparatus to constraint those who make claims upon it or who say things that denigrate this or that section of society. A college professor in West Bengal draws a cartoon of...

-Outlook Viewing with concern incidents of acid attacks, the Supreme Court today directed the Centre to convene in six weeks a meeting of Chief Secretaries of all states and Union Territories to address the menace and discuss framing of a law for treatment and compensation to victims. Not satisfied with the steps taken by the Centre to regulate sale of acid and to curb its use for attacking women, a bench headed...