-The Hindu The order may give rise to property and employment benefit claims relating to unmarried people. Parents could find sexual partners of their children making demands for a share of their assets. The discussion on the Madras High Court verdict on the implications of sexual relationships between unmarried couples has been wide-ranging - from mirthful responses to the suggestion that such liaisons could attain marital status under certain circumstances, to sympathetic...

As fatal rains batter parts of the north Indian hill state of Uttarakhand, following a summer that also saw hundreds of deaths from heat waves, a new assessment out on June 19 from the World Bank warns of increasingly difficult effects of climate change on several parts of South Asia in the next 20-30 years. It argues that extreme weather events are likely to get more frequent, as temperatures rise. The...

-The Economic Times An RBI-appointed panel of bankers will decide on the appropriate technology for retail payments in a month. And the choice is reportedly between Aadhaar, the biometric-based unique identity system, and EMV, a globally accepted technology standard for credit card, debit card and ATM transactions, used by Visa and MasterCard. This is baffling. Why should it be one technology standard or the other? Both Aadhaar and EMV should co-exist...

-The Economic Times If India is now debating opening the books and operations of political parties to the public, it's because of these six people who pulled strategic levers and applied relentless pressure. Soma Banerjee traces a four-year effort that converted intent to action Balwant Singh Khera, a politician from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, is not a name that will strike a chord in mainstream politics or social discourse today. It might in...

-The Indian Express Should political parties be brought under the RTI? Two former central information commissioners debate On reading The Indian Express editorial ('Party police', June 5) and Pratap Bhanu Mehta's article ('Party fixing', IE, June 6) about the CIC order declaring that six political parties are public authorities, I felt they had missed a crucial point. The decision of the commission has been based on the RTI Act. The act states...