-The Hindu They have neither sought review of CIC ruling nor challenged it in court Seventeen months after the Central Information Commission ruled that the Right to Information Act applied to six national political parties, none of them has complied with the Act or appealed against it. A full Bench of the commission, comprising Information Commissioners Vijai Sharma, Sharat Sabharwal and Manjula Prasher, had posted a hearing on the parties' non-compliance with its...

-The Hindu The imperatives of governance have a tendency to make political parties think differently once they are in power and revisit earlier misgivings. Nothing illustrates this better than the Narendra Modi government's decision to go ahead with the ‘Aadhaar' scheme aimed at giving unique identification numbers to residents. The Bharatiya Janata Party had on some occasions in the past voiced its reservations about the viability and desirability of the...

-The Hindustan Times To kick-start stalled development projects and remove investment bottlenecks, the government is expected to make changes to the land acquisition act during the winter session that opens on November 24. Dilution of the consent clause, restricting social impact assessment to large projects and giving states the powers to define "emergency" under "urgency clause" for acquiring land are some of the major amendments -- demanded by various states -- that...

-The Hindu ‘The government has taken steps to destroy MGNREGA, an act that gives purchasing power to the rural poor, following prejudicial contentions of Bharatiya Janata Party leaders' It's no secret that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) does not like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. MGNREGA is perhaps the only law in the world which guarantees 100 days of wage employment a year to one member of a rural...

-Tehelka The new and improved Bill to prevent atrocities against Dalits runs the risk of being put in the cold storage A crime against Dalits happens every 18 minutes - three women raped every day, 13 murdered every week, 27 atrocities every day, six kidnapped every week and so on. This is the data compiled by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, an NGO, which paints a grim picture of Indian...