-Outlook Pulses are falling off the poor man’s plate. Price rise may hit the middle class next. Pulses—all-important as a source of protein—are set to be spoilers this year in the government’s endeavour to keep a check on food inflation. Already, over the last nine months, the prices of some pulses have jumped 64 per cent in major cities. This is because of below-normal monsoon last year, compounded by untimely rain and...

-IPS News BETUL, India- Mamta Bai, 36, distinctly remembers the first time the police came to her village: it was December 2014 and her neighbour, Purva Bai, had just been beaten unconscious by her alcoholic husband, prompting Mamta to make a distress call to the nearest station. Once in the neighborhood, policemen pulled the abusive husband out of his home and asked the village women if they wanted him to be arrested. “Yes,”...

It is difficult for a person to get aadhaar card/number if s/he does not have pre-existing proofs of identity and address. It has been revealed from a reply to RTI application that only 2.19 lakh aadhaar numbers have been issued to people who did not have any other prior identity proof, which is just 0.03% of total aadhaar numbers generated so far. The RTI reply dated 28 April, 2015 by the Unique...

-The Hindu Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey speak about the MKSS experience and their campaign for citizen-centric accountability. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan was founded in Bhim on May 1, 1990 with the aim of organising people at the grassroots. By addressing issues of minimum wage and land and reading out official records, thereby exposing the enormous corruption in the system, it mobilised peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. A dharna held...

-The Hindu For working India’s federal system, one has to go beyond brute parliamentary majorities and grapple with the multilevel government-opposition matrix, which is the architecture of Centre-State power-sharing Apart from the promise of providing a Congress-free India, the most frequent leitmotif of Mr. Modi’s electoral campaign was that he would usher in a new era for Indian federalism. Based on the idea that a state leader’s vision from below could transform...