-The Telegraph A rights organisation today accused the Centre and state governments of giving huge, unaccounted grants to NGOs including blacklisted ones, often against a bribe. The Asian Centre for Human Rights said it was basing its claims on replies to a series of RTI applications it had filed in 2010. Releasing the report, “India’s Funds to NGOs Squandered”, the rights body’s director, Suhas Chakma, made these claims at a news conference...

-The Hindustan Times Publicly funded NGOs, some of them working in key sectors, such as health and rural development, have squandered hundreds of crores of rupees, a report released by a voluntary organisation said. In its  report ‘India’s Funds to NGOs Squandered’, Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) said government funding of voluntary organisations was in dire need of reform as the audit by the CAG of India was infrequent, inadequate and...

-The Indian Express At a time when there’s a chorus for showing no leniency to the juvenile among the six arrested for the gangrape of the 23-year-old woman who later died in a Singapore hospital, children’s rights workers are cautioning that laws should not be bent simply because there is public outrage. Minna Kabir, voluntary children’s rights worker who has long been associated with the legal aid cell at the juvenile justice...

-The Hindu The old Penal Code exempts it as an offence if a wife is not under 16 Opposing the death penalty for those guilty of rape, women’s groups have demanded that marital rape, stalking and stripping be regarded as serious offences. The old Penal Code and the proposed amendments exempt marital rape as an offence if a wife is not under 16 years of age. This exemption, totally and unreasonably, ignores the...

Should they be targeted? Should they go to individuals or households? Are conditionalities necessary? Without a full consideration of these issues, cash transfers will remain an expensive gamble Having worked on cash transfers for over 25 years, and being an economist, I find recent criticisms of the idea shrill and ill-informed. Only a right-wing ideologue would call them a panacea or a cure-all. They would merely be a vast improvement on...