-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Nearly a year after the role of a juvenile in the gang-rape of Nirbhaya triggered a storm of outrage while the crime itself led to widespread street protests, the government has proposed that youngsters above 16 years of age guilty of heinous crimes be treated on par with adult offenders. The decision to amend the existing law so that provisions of the Indian Penal Code relating...

-The Indian Express Domestic workers must be brought within the purview of labour laws. The extreme abuse and mistreatment of domestic workers is becoming a part of day-to-day city life, as the recent cases of Brutality in Delhi show. This is not to suggest that such incidents never occurred before, but the intensity and scale of such brutal violence are definitely becoming worse. This is alarming, given that there has been a...

-The Hindustan Times New Delhi: We had not yet recovered from the horror played out in Member of Parliament Dhananjay Singh's home in New Delhi's VIP enclave when another horrific case of maid abuse tumbled out from a middle-class neighbourhood in east Delhi last week. A 55-year-old Non-Resident Indian, in town to take care of her ailing mother, allegedly tortured her maid by branding her with hot kitchen tongs. A minor...

-The Hindu ‘Victims of communal carnage still struggling, socially and financially' Forbesganj/Bhagalpur: Bhajanpur village is a few kilometres off Bihar's showcase ‘four-lane,' as drivers call the highway, a far cry from the State's back-breaking roads of the past, near Forbesganj town. Residents tell us that those affected by the kaand incident, of two years ago, live a little ahead, in the Ansari basti. A bumpy ride across the village leads to Ale Rasool...

-The Hindu When a death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...