-The Hindu The problem with the SC/ST Act is the failure of the criminal justice system to recognise its own casteist biases For India’s Dalits and Adivasis, May 1 this year was a ‘May Day’ in more ways than one. It was May Day, the day to commemorate the labour movement (the vast majority of them do belong to the working classes), and also ‘mayday’ in the maritime sense, an occasion to...

-News18.com In an interview with News18’s Rupashree Nanda, Dreze, who was a member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and an architect of the National Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), says that there have been no major initiatives in the social field in the last four years, with the partial exception of Swachh Bharat. Government data reveal that the Indian economy is growing at a robust rate but noted economist Jean Dreze believes...

-The Hindu The focus must be on enhancing rape conviction rates and taking steps to rehabilitate and empower survivors Amid belligerent demands for capital punishment for rapists, on Sunday the President signed an ordinance that introduces the death penalty for those convicted of raping girls below the age of 12. But this clamour for introducing the most stringent punishment has conveniently sidestepped the more cogent criticism of the systemic failures in addressing...

-The Indian Express To deal with corruption, it is not enough to just get fiscal policies right. It is in our collective long-term interest to nurture individual values. I went to an optometrist last week, who gave me one of those cards to read where the font starts out large and then gets progressively small, to test your reading capacity. In this case what was interesting was the content of the card....

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Amid growing public outrage over the Kathua and Unnao incidents, a collective of retired civil servants has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling the current situation a “moment of existential crisis” in which the government’s response would determine whether the nation could “overcome the crisis of constitutional values, of governance and the ethical order”. In a strongly worded letter that sought to pin the blame...