-The Indian Express Amid the clamour to establish fast-track courts for rape cases, the numbers tell a different story in Rajasthan, where such courts were first set up. While the conviction rate in rape cases has stayed the same and pendency has barely improved, authorities admit that due to hurried trials, a fair share of convictions are overturned in the high court. All rape cases were transferred to fast-track courts in Rajasthan...
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Over 2,000 fewer farmers every day-P Sainath
-The Hindu The mistaken notion that the 53 per cent of India's population ‘dependent on agriculture' are all ‘farmers' leads many to dismiss the massive farmers' suicides as trivial There are nearly 15 million farmers (‘Main' cultivators) fewer than there were in 1991. Over 7.7 million less since 2001, as the latest Census data show. On average, that's about 2,035 farmers losing ‘Main Cultivator' status every single day for the last 20...
More »Blood, sweat and tears-Alok Gupta
-Down to Earth For RTI activists of Bihar the cost of exposing corruption is life Twenty-year-old Rahul Kumar, a right to information (RTI) activist, knew the land mafia was behind his parents' murder. His mother and father were involved in a land dispute in Muzaffarpur's Sirisia Jagdish village. Barely a week after filing an RTI application to seek information about the murderers, Kumar was kidnapped. A day later, on March 10, 2012,...
More »Freedom that must have limits-Vaishna Roy
-The Hindu "Freedom without limits is just a word" -Terry Pratchett Kamlesh Vaswani's PIL seeking to ban the viewing of pornography and make it a non-bailable offence has raised eyebrows. Columnists and social media commentators have greeted the idea with shock, raising issues such as social liberty, sexual freedom, and the fact that the mere banning of pornography might not bring down the incidence of rape. On the surface of it, this sounds...
More »Juvenile homes are hellholes, says report on child rape -Aarti Dhar
-The Hindu Asian Centre for Human Rights blames Centre, States for continuing assault There was a 336 per cent increase in child rape cases in the country between 2001 and 2011, a large number of the crimes committed in juvenile justice homes run and aided by the government. Citing National Crime Records Bureau statistics, the latest report on child sexual assaults in India says 48,338 rape cases were reported during the decade. Tip of...
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