-The Hindu Isolated innovations are not enough to stop cases of custodial torture In May 2017, addressing representatives from countries at the UN’s Human Rights Council, the then Attorney General of India said, “The concept of torture is completely alien to our culture and it has no place in the governance of the nation.” Last week in Sitamarhi district, Bihar, two families received the bodies of their two sons from the police. The...

-The Hindu New Delhi: With just 10 days to go for the first payout deadline under PM-KISAN, only 2.74 crore farm families, or about 56% of the total list of 4.92 crore names submitted by States, have been paid so far. The remaining 2.18 crore farm families are still awaiting processing or are caught somewhere within a four-stage validation process set up belatedly to weed out fakes. The scheme to pay Rs....

-The Hindu Business Line The dismal quality of graduates is impacting the job market. But even high skilled workers are finding the going tough A big controversy has erupted over job creation under the Modi regime —in pARTicular, over whether the unemployment rate in 2017-18 is, in fact, the highest in four decades as CMIE data as well as the officially undisclosed but reported in the press NSSO data seem to indicate. Further,...

-Hindustan Times From a constitutional point of view, the scheme fails the tests of rationality and non-arbitrariness Earlier this month, the Supreme Court indicated that it would hear the long-pending constitutional challenge to the electoral bonds scheme. The electoral bonds scheme, which was introduced by the government in early 2018, provides new channels for private funding of political pARTies, and has been subjected to severe criticism, including by a former Chief Election...

-The Hindu Sabotaging the Forest Rights Act damages democracy Since 1980, through the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has “diverted for non-forest use” (bureaucratese for destroyed) over 1.5 million hectares of forest. How many Adivasis and forest-dwellers have been evicted by this ‘lawful’ forest destruction? Stripping these forests has yielded thousands of crores of rupees for corporations to which a bulk of these forestlands...