-The Hindu     Young offenders above a certain age who commit violent crimes should be prosecuted as adults On August 31, 2013, the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) ordered that the boy who raped Nirbhaya, brutalised her with an iron rod, pulled out her intestines and then cleaned up the bus and made tea would go virtually free by sentencing him to only 28 months in a remand home as eight months of the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Foreign corporations have created over 247,000 jobs through research and development (R&D) investments in India over the past decade, but most of the activities appear relatively unimportant with little long-term gains , researchers have said. The study, described as the first comprehensive assessment of foreign direct investment (FDI) in R&D, has challenged suggestions by Indian science policy makers and foreign corporations a decade ago that turning India into...

-The Indian Express Holding back the RTI amendment is not the best way to address public concerns about party finance. There has been great civil society uproar over the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2013, which aims to extricate political parties from mandatory public disclosures, and nullify the Central Information Commission's recent order. While passing the amendment would have been all too easy, given the broad political consensus, a last-minute turnaround in...

-The Hindu Jagdish Bhagwati's attacks on Amartya Sen are based on a series of misattributions and obscure the real issues on which the two economists differ Rich and lively public debates are the raison d'être of any democracy. But the recent attacks by Professor Jagdish Bhagwati on Dr. Amartya Sen confound the real issues on which Sen and Bhagwati differ. Bhagwati tries to position himself as a proponent of growth that would benefit...

-The Hindu New IPCC report raises questions over urgency or seriousness of climate change The climate has not been warming over the past 15 years at rates predicted earlier, the latest report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be released September end, is going to say. The report is also going to accept that carbon dioxide gas concentration in atmosphere may not be as potent in causing global temperature...