-CaravanMagazine.in India is often hailed for its democracy, for empowering its poor and ordinary citizens to participate in the electoral process and play a role in shaping the country. This narrative has increasingly come under strain since the Supreme Court, through its March 2003 judgment in Union of India vs Association for Democratic Reforms, made it mandatory for candidates contesting elections to disclose their wealth, educational qualification, and criminal cases pending...

-The Hindu The government must put the MCA-21 data under scrutiny and bring transparency in calculating corporate output About a third of non-government non-financial companies in the services sector are not traceable is the finding of a National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey for 2016-17 that has just been released. Since such entities could be shell/fake/bogus companies included in the MCA-21 database of “active” companies used for estimating the gross domestic...

-The Hindu Several interventions are needed on the demand and supply side to alleviate farm distress Loan waivers remain the preferred solution for governments to tackle farm distress. S. Mahendra Dev and M. Govinda Rao talk about the inability of governments to think of long-term solutions to tackle farm distress, in a discussion moderated by Vikas Dhoot. Edited excerpts: * Despite farm productivity rising, severe distress in the sector is a concern. How...

-The Telegraph Supreme Court has rejected a review petition by 21 Opposition parties seeking paper slip counts on 50 per cent of VVPAT devices New Delhi: The plan to tally paper slips with the votes registered on 20,625 of the 10.35 lakh electronic machines deployed nationwide cannot guarantee the integrity of the electoral process against targeted tampering or machine malfunction, specialists have said. They have added that different sizes of random counts in...

-The Hindu Unlike the rest of the world, India is stridently moving away from community-involved conservation models In February this year, one of the world’s 17 megadiverse countries issued a court order which stood to evict more than a million forest-dwelling people from their homes. More damningly, India, a state that supports about 8% of global species diversity and over 100 million forest-dwellers, did not even put up a legal defence before...