-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh have joined 18 other states to empower the Centre to bring a legislation against honour killings, in what could be a turnaround moment for the effort to curb the powers of caste and community bodies which seek to be the final arbiter of social mores and arrogate unto themselves the power of judiciary. In its affidavit to the Supreme Court the Union...

-Economic and Political Weekly The current regime seeks to reform labour laws with the understanding that these reforms will improve industrial growth and expand the possibilities of enterprise. However, there is already ample evidence from within India that this obsession with reforming labour law, particularly in the way the government has done it till now, will not take us any closer in creating more jobs or a healthy industrial sector. These...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act that guarantees employment of every rural household for 100 days has different progressive provisions to incentivise participation of women in the programme. Official data suggest that 47% of all MGNREGA workers are women. The extent to which the programme is inclusive of women, with a particular focus on sub-populations of women such as widows and mothers of young children...

-Livemint India, US resolve differences over public stockholding for food security, clearing way for WTO trade facilitation deal New Delhi: India and the US have resolved differences over public stockholding of foodgrains with the US agreeing to an indefinite "peace clause" pending a permanent settlement-a Development that makes possible the most significant global deal since the 1990s. US support for the massive public food stockholding programme also signals a political victory for...

-The Hindu India has dramatically reduced not only the number of underweight children but also the numbers of stunted and wasted children, new details of yet-unreleased official nutrition data show. The proportion of children under the age of five who are stunted has fallen from 48 per cent to 39 per cent between 2005-6 and 2013-14, the new numbers show, meaning that India now has 14.5 million fewer stunted children. Stunting is...