-The Indian Express Of late, there has been much public debate around the effectiveness of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), particularly on its targeting of the poor and the socioeconomic profile of its beneficiaries (most notably in this newspaper). It is important to look at these claims closely, not as much to counter them but as to present the real picture that has been undermined by often-unsubstantiated...

-The Times of India BANGALORE: India's burgeoning population appears to be both a problem and an advantage. Very soon, the southern states are likely to stare at an un-Indian situation: a shrinking populace, owing to a sharp dip in the fertility rate of women. Analyzing the 2011 Census data, the Population Research Centre of the Bangalore-based Institute for Social and Economic Change found that many southern districts, a significant number of them...

-The Indian Express Less than a year after it ratified the legal status of the Right To Education (RTE) Act, the Supreme Court has held it "appropriate" for a Constitution Bench to test yet again the constitutional validity of the social welfare legislation enacted with Constitutional amendments. A Bench, LED by Justice K S Radhakrishnan, last week ordered for placing a petition moved by a bunch of Karnataka-based institutions before the Chief...

-The Times of India The amended anti-rape law does not include prostitution as a form of exploitation unlike the ordinance that criminalized sex work. The Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 2013 makes a distinction between sexual exploitation and consensual adult sex work. The move was welcomed by sex workers and activists who had slammed the ordinance that defined prostitution as exploitation. The ordinance cleared by the Cabinet on the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill,...

-The Hindu The Sunday Story India's police forces are generally hostile and corrupt. They are also often brutal, as the recent beating of unarmed people in Tarn Tarn and Patna demonstrated. The Indian Police Act of 1861, a colonial relic, needs to be replaced with a law that befits a free country. The former Border Security Force (BSF) Director-General, Prakash Singh, refers to his favourite game of ping pong whenever he has...