-Livemint.com NGO Common Cause said in a petition that governments and law enforcement agencies had abused sedition laws to gag dissent, suppress Freedom of speech and expression and to muzzle critical voices New Delhi: Common Cause, a non-governmental organization, on Wednesday moved the Supreme Court, alleging misuse and misapplication of sedition laws by successive governments, leading to routine persecution of students, journalists and intellectuals engaged in social activism. Common Cause said in...

-The Indian Express On Independence Day, we salute our Freedom fighters. We also remember Lal Bahadur Shastri who gave us the slogan, jai jawan, jai kisan.   PM Modi needs to move from slogans to action to transform agriculture.   Atal Bihari Vajpayee expanded the slogan to jai jawan, jai kisan, jai vigyan. The present government has an array of slogans for the farmers. Prime Minister Modi has coined so many — swacchh bharat,...

-The Hindu Business Line Bihar village gives up fertilisers/ pesticides for eco-agriculture On World Environment Day last year — which happened to be one of the hottest summer mornings — as we stood on the main road roughly a kilometre from Kedia village, in the Jamui district of Bihar, we heard loud voices in the distance. Soon we found 50-60 children marching and shouting in unison, ‘Jeevit maati... jeevit khet!’ (alive is the...

-The Hindu Democracies are not sustained by obedient productive units in so-called knowledge-based economies. But that is precisely what the new National Education Policy envisages “Public policy,” according to Douglas Gomery, “is the making of governmental rules and regulations to benefit not one individual but society as a whole. It asks, what is the best way to conceive and evaluate policies aimed at the public as a whole and its various subgroups?”...

-TheGuardian.com Hardworking women in India care for family members, cook, clean, garden, sew and farm without getting paid. When will official statistics recognise this? Women’s participation in work is an indicator of their status in a society. Paid work offers more opportunities for women’s agency, mobility and empowerment, and it usually leads to greater social recognition of the work that women do, whether paid or unpaid. Where women’s work participation rates are relatively...