-The Indian Express Booming Indian antelope populations threaten crops in many areas. Farmers are reluctant to strike against them, so the herds have only feral packs to fear. A couple of centuries ago, some four million blackbuck roamed the Indian landmass south of the Himalayas from undivided “Punjab to Nepal and probably in most parts of the Peninsula where the country is wooded and hilly, but not in dense jungle”. At...

-The Indian Express Of 700-odd districts, merely 194 have the recommended exclusive courts for SC/ST Act cases. The Sunday Express travels to two such courts — one in Ahmedabad, set up after Una, and the other in Banda, a district with a high number of cases — to find a familiar story Over 1.44 lakh cases of atrocities against Scheduled Castes and 23,408 cases of atrocities against Scheduled Tribes came for trial...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Different answers by two Union ministers to the same question have left the "victim" bewildered. The conflicting answers have both been given in Parliament, making a mockery of the principle of "collective responsibility" of the government. While information technology and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had on February 2 stated that an FIR had been registered against unknown persons over a newspaper report on Aadhaar data breach, junior home...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court directs that public servants can only be arrested with the written permission of their appointing authority. The anti-atrocities law, which protects Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes from casteist slurs and discrimination, has become an instrument to “blackmail” innocent citizens and public servants, the Supreme Court observed in a judgment on Tuesday. Issuing a slew of guidelines to protect public servants and private employees from arbitrary arrests under the...