-The Hindu Over 3,000 of the 2.8 lakh have been behind bars for more than five years Two of every three persons incarcerated in India have not yet been convicted of any crime, and Muslims are over-represented among such undertrials, new official data show. Despite repeated Supreme Court orders on the rights of undertrials, the jails are filling ever faster with them, shows Prisons Statistics for 2013 released by the National Crime Records...

-The Telegraph The National Democratic Alliance government is planning to scrap the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The chief minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, had already asked for the employment programme of the MGNREGA under which the state was obliged to provide employment on demand (failing which an unemployment allowance of a specified amount had to be paid), to be downgraded to a mere "food-for-work" programme, where the state...

-Down to Earth Death and injury prevention get little attention To address the problem of road safety, the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has published a draft Road Transport and Safety Bill for public comments and suggestions. If passed by Parliament, it would replace the existing Motor Vehicles Act of 1988. While the bill should be aiming for zero mortality, it has set a target to save 200,000 lives in...

-Deccan Herald In accordance with a new agroecology initiative within the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, by using the agroecological methods, small farmers are key to feeding the world, Nafeez Ahmed notes. Modern industrial agricultural methods can no longer feed the world, due to the impacts of overlapping environmental and ecological crises linked to land, water and resource availability. The stark warning comes from the new United Nations Special Rapporteur on the...

-Outlook AP Initiates Economic Empowerment of women Through Sand Mining Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh government has launched an initiative of entrusting sand mining to women self-help groups, which is essentially expected to curb the thriving sand mafia. The move will ensure economic empowerment of women as part of the government's 'Pedarikam pai gelupu' (victory over poverty) drive and make sand available at a reasonable price to customers. The income generated from sand mining and...