-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Sureme Court today sought responses from the Centre and six states on a public interest petition seeking a ban on cow vigilante groups across the country. These states are Gujarat -where cow vigilantes' public flogging of four Dalit men in July sparked a countrywide furore - Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. Maharashtra-based social activists and Congress sympathisers Tehseen Poonawala and his brother Shehzad Poonawala had moved...

-The Indian Express The NCC held that it is for the presiding member of the consumer forum to choose either of the methods to ensure its orders are not breached. New Delhi: IN A stern message to all builders, the National Consumer Commission (NCC) has held that officials of real estate firms can be Arrested for failing to hand over flats or make refunds on time. Last week, the Commission bench, presided...

-Hindustan Times Patiala: The banned practice of crop-residue burning continues in the district, as farmers are in a hurry to clear their fields for the next crop. On Monday, police booked an offending farmer, Bahadur Singh of Fathepur village on Sangrur road, under Section 188 of the Indian Penal Code (defying the order promulgated by a public servant). “There were more farmers on the spot but Bahadur Singh owned the field on fire,”...

-The Hindu Without doubt, India needs to go forward with bio-safe agricultural practices, but the farmers need to be helped to make them sustainable Reshma religiously mixes cow dung and manure in the soil in her farm, hoping for a better yield at least this time around. Reshma is a 22-year old smallholder farmer in a village outside Hyderabad. She is a part of the growing army of farmers in India who...

-The Indian Express Preventive detention is being routinised as an instrument of state repression The recent preventive detention (PD) of Khurram Parvez, a Kashmiri human rights activist, and Jignesh Mewani, a Dalit leader from Gujarat, has turned the spotlight on the provision of PD and the purposes it is being made to serve. National Crime Records Bureau data released in September 2015 indicate that over 3,200 people were being held in administrative...