-ThePrint.in India’s rights watchdog NHRC — labelled ‘toothless tiger’ — is swamped with cases but has little resources to address them. This, despite an ‘A’ rating from UN body. New Delhi: On paper, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which turned 25 last week, is a success story. In February, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI), a UN body based in Geneva, re-accredited India’s apex rights watchdog with the ‘A’...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: When she saw a family all at sea in the court corridors, advocate Anjali Rajput stepped in to offer free legal aid. Like her, over 130 advocates on the panel of the Delhi State Legal Services Authority (DSLSA) offer much-needed help to citizen litigants in Delhi's 11 districts, not only in courtrooms, but also through awareness camps in schools, slums, police stations and other public...

-Scroll.in Raghav Chandra, secretary of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, says displaced Adivasis should not only be compensated with money but land as well. The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes has been quite proactive in the last few months. It has prevailed upon the central government to withdraw orders that it thought “diluted” tribal rights, asked states to return “unfairly acquired tribal lands”, and reminded governors of their powers to...

-Scroll.in The newspaper analysed FIRs for 20 of the 63 encounter deaths since the Bharatiya Janata Party came into power in the state. Similar words and patterns can be seen in the police’s description of the circumstances surrounding several encounter deaths in Uttar Pradesh since March 2017, an analysis of 20 First Information Reports by The Indian Express showed. The state police has controversially gunned down 63 alleged criminals and injured 584...

-The Hindu The RTI Act Amendment Bill must be junked The Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, has empowered millions of Indians to question governments and hold public functionaries accountable. Of the nearly six million RTI applications filed every year in the country, a large proportion are by the poorest and the most marginalised who seek information about their basic rights and entitlements, like rations, pensions and health facilities. The use of...