-The Hindu Voters need not know the funding source of parties, A-G tells court New Delhi: Voters do not need to know from where political parties get their funds, the government argued in the Supreme Court on Thursday. The court cannot “kill” the electoral bonds scheme for the sake of transparency, Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said. He argued that the bond was an experiment to eradicate black money and the court should not...

-The Indian Express An urban employment guarantee programme is an idea whose time has come. Temperatures are rapidly warming up in what promises to be a blistering summer of India’s electioneering. Amidst the belligerent grandstanding on national security and the communal messaging barely below the surface, Rahul Gandhi’s announcement of a minimum income guarantee scheme came as a relief, if only because it tried to steer the public discussions to the...

-Newsclick.in NYAY amounts to a largesse by the government, an act of charity towards the bottom quintile, not the institution of a universal economic right to decent living. My attitude to the NYAY scheme of the Congress is similar to my attitude to a benevolent monarchy. While a benevolent monarchy is better than a tyrannical one, any monarchy is repugnant compared to a republic. Likewise compared to the current neo-liberal regime any...

-The Hindu The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has constituted a Central Monitoring Committee to ensure the implementation of action plan MEAnt for reducing pollution stretches across the country. A Bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel said, “Having given due consideration to the serious issue and inadequacy of success achieved so far, we find it necessary to constitute a Central Monitoring Committee to undertake a national initiative by way of...

-TheWire.in As modern jobs evade the state, rural millennials continue a pattern of out-migration that leaves hundreds of villages abandoned, or populated only by the elderly. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a third ‘M’, beyond Muslims and minorities, exists that can no longer wait to receive his attention. This is the epic-scale migration out of India’s mountain states, and I don’t MEAn Jammu and Kashmir. Uttarakhand became the 27th state of the...