-Scroll.in Suranga is a horizontal tunnel-like well excavated in a hillside. Even as Kerala reels under severe drought, Gangadhar Rao never misses a day to irrigate thousands of areca nut trees, coconut trees and pepper plants on his 30 acres of farmland. Rao is a farmer from Bedadka Panchayath in Kerala’s northernmost district of Kasaragod and depends on Suranga for all his water needs — irrigation and domestic — round the year. Suranga is...

-The Hindu Business Line These bearer instruments can’t make political funding transparent; they don’t address the insidious corporate-politico nexus The Government is all set to introduce a scheme offering political bonds as bearer instruments which will conceal the identity of the bond buyers and enable a process of political donations that, it argues, will make funding political parties transparent. The argument is deeply flawed. Electoral bonds as envisaged here open up yet another...

-The Hindu When will the government operationalise the Lokpal law, even in its diluted form? In a hearing recently regarding non-operationalisation of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, more than three years after the law was enacted, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi reportedly argued in the Supreme Court that the court has no powers to direct the government on when and how the law should be enforced. Failure to implement the Lokpal law by the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today decided to refer to a five-judge Constitution bench the question whether the right to free speech and expression includes "the right to insult another person's right to dignity". A bench of Justices Dipak Misra, A.M. Khanwilkar and M. Shantanagoudar asked senior advocates Harish Salve and Fali Nariman, assisting the court as amicus curiae, and a counsel for former Uttar Pradesh minister Azam Khan to...

-Scroll.in While officials say waivers could jeopardise allocation for other key sectors, farmer unions and economists feel it is a necessity given the farming crisis. Developments in three states over the past week have brought the debate on the waiver of farm loans back under the political spotlight. In Uttar Pradesh, the newly-elected Bharatiya Janata Party government under Chief Minister Adityanath announced on Wednesday that it would write-off crop loans of up...