-The Hindu Admits lawyer’s letter seeking court-monitored probe as PIL petition Amid mounting pressure on the Uttar Pradesh police to solve the Unnao gang-rape case and custodial death of the minor victim’s father, the Allahabad High Court on Wednesday took suo motu cognisance of the matter. Acting on a request by senior advocate Gopal S. Chaturvedi for a court-monitored probe, the HC admitted his letter as a Public Interest Litigation plea. The matter...

-Press Release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha dated 11 April, 2018 Stagnant wage rates are not the only rude shock that workers of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) received this month. Most of the them also remain unpaid for the work done by them in the past few months. Ninety-nine per cent of the Fund Transfer Orders (FTOs) for MGNREGA wage payments sent to the Public Finance Management...

-Scroll.in The existing policy bans commercial activity in natural forests to protect forest dwellers. The new draft policy is up for public comments till April 14. The Union government has drafted a new National Forest Policy. If approved, the policy will allow the corporate sector to grow, harvest and sell trees on government-owned forest lands. So far, this is explicitly banned under the existing National Forest Policy, which was laid down...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court directs that public servants can only be arrested with the written permission of their appointing authority. The anti-atrocities law, which protects Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes from casteist slurs and discrimination, has become an instrument to “blackmail” innocent citizens and public servants, the Supreme Court observed in a judgment on Tuesday. Issuing a slew of guidelines to protect public servants and private employees from arbitrary arrests under the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Tuesday's Supreme Court order extending the Aadhaar-linking deadline indefinitely came after activist-lawyer Vrinda Grover had rushed in and challenged the authorities' decision to cancel her passport for not possessing an Aadhaar card. The five-judge bench was in the middle of a scheduled hearing of Public Interest petitions against Aadhaar's constitutionality. Grover said through senior advocate Arvind Datar that she had gone to the passport authorities here for the issuance...