-Hindustan Times It is also important to remember that both these laws were the product of sustained, grassroots-level social movements. Consequently, perhaps the surest remedy against possible future dilution may lie not in judicial challenges (although that remains important), but in popular mobilisation. With the 2019 general election yielding a decisive mandate for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), attention will soon turn to the new government’s legislative agenda. As the government is...

-The Hindu Business Line Distracted by elections, the country’s alarming water crisis has been overlooked As India’s water crisis gets visibly worse with every passing summer, it is clear that the Bureaucracy and policymakers are not working to find immediate and long-term solutions. This time, the apathy seems to have worsened due to the ongoing elections. In Maharashtra and Kerala, for instance, the administrations have taken refuge in the ‘model code of...

-Business Standard Forest Bureaucracy to get more policing powers, including higher immunity to use firearms and override Forest Rights Act New Delhi: The Union government has proposed an overhaul of the Indian Forest Act, 1927 which the British rulers imposed to take over Indian forests, use them to produce timber, while curtailing and extinguishing rights of millions. But, in the draft law to replace the colonial-era act, the Union government has proposed...

-The Indian Express Rahul Gandhi’s proposed scheme will do more harm than good if it comes at the cost of existing subsidies for the poor. Congress president Rahul Gandhi signaled the earnestness of his party’s resolve to end poverty and hunger by announcing an untried policy instrument — a Minimum Income Guarantee for the poor. “Millions of our brothers and sisters” could not be allowed to “suffer the scourge of poverty”...

-The Hindu There are few parallels anywhere else of the state itself producing statelessness in the manner that it is doing in Assam By requiring long-term residents of Assam to prove their citizenship by negotiating a thicket made up of bewildering and opaque rules and an uncaring Bureaucracy, the Indian state has for the past two decades unleashed an unrelenting nightmare of wanton injustice on a massive swathe of its most vulnerable...