-The Hindu Bench offers limited and unidimensional explanations to petitioners’ queries The Supreme Court judgment upholding the new Haryana panchayat law, which limits the voter’s freedom to choose his own candidate in a participatory democracy, offers limited and unidimensional explanations to questions and issues raised by parties in court. The judgment by a Bench led by Justice J. Chelameswar does not explain why it considers the reasons for disqualification in Section 175 of...

-TheNewsMinute.com The law will disproportionately affect women, and among them, Dalit women The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a Haryana law which would make 83 percent of Dalit women and 71 percent of women in general ineligible to participate in grassroots democracy. The Supreme Court upheld amendments to a law that the Haryana Assembly passed earlier this year. Elections to panchayats scheduled for October were postponed after the All India Democratic Women’s Association...

-NDTV In a few days, on the 29th of November, a group of four safai karmacharis (sweepers) and three beldars (diggers) along with three more senior persons, all working for the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), will be returning from a week-long official trip to Japan and South Korea where they are learning first-hand about sanitation, cleanliness, waste disposal as well as the maintenance of urban colonies, markets etc. The NDMC...

-PTI Claiming flaws in the process of identifying beneficiaries of welfare schemes based on the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) data, a group of parliamentarians, intellectuals and socials activists today appealed to the Centre to take corrective measures to provide benefits to the deserving lot. In a memorandum submitted to Union Rural Development Minister Birender Singh, the members picked flaws in the process of identifying welfare schemes beneficiaries. "The clearly stated aim...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A joint parliamentary panel examining the Narendra Modi government's land acquisition bill has been flooded with objections to the proposed legislation from those who have deposed before it so far, sources have said. The Confederation of Indian Industry is the only one among 34 individuals and organisations to have supported the changes the bill seeks to make to the current law, passed in December 2013 under UPA rule,...