-Livemint.com The government relies on for-profit big business to deliver public goods despite their inability to deliver Can we listen to the budget as an annual public statement by the government of its economic and social philosophy and intent? The centre abandoned five-year plans that earlier laid down a road map of where government policies are headed. The budget, then, is an important reality check of whether the government is literally...

-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Reshma Devi, 50, wakes up at 4 every morning and walks a kilometer to fetch water from a government pipeline. The only water source in her locality, a tube well, has dried up. And she has not enough money to buy water being sold at Rs 20 for 50 litres. Devi, a resident of Ranchi’s Yamuna Nagar, is not alone. More than 15,000 residents of 12 localities spread over...

-The Hindu The question whether marital rape should be treated as a criminal offence has once again arisen after Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi repeated the government’s stand in a written reply in Parliament. She said, “The concept of marital rape as understood internationally cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors like level of education/illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious...

-The Hindu As the government pushes for ‘Make in India’, it could begin by unmaking the damage the post-1991 reforms inflicted on domestic industry. This year marks 25 years since the so-called “economic reforms” were launched in July 1991. By now, broad contours of the policies and practices that characterised such reforms are well known, viz. radical deregulation, marketisation and privatisation of the industrial, technological and financial sectors, and an across-the-board...

-The Hindu The Aadhaar Bill opens the door to mass surveillance. This danger needs to be seen in the light of recent attacks on the right to dissent. No other country, and certainly no democratic country, has ever held its own citizens hostage to such a powerful infrastructure of surveillance. The Aadhaar project was sold to the public based on the claim that enrolment was “voluntary”. This basically meant that there was...