-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-The Hindu Shinde assures MPs that such courts will be set up to expedite trial Amid charges of "innocent" Muslims being falsely implicated in terror cases, the Union government is likely to set up fast track courts to expedite their trial. Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde gave the assurance to a group of MPs and civil rights activists who met him to demand a "clear-cut time frame" for setting up such courts and freeing...

Groups from across India gathered in Delhi recently to assess the Forest Rights Act’s journey since 2006. The law is often dubbed as ‘landmark’ because it ended the age-old illegality surrounding communities living in forest areas by entitling them to individual and community land title. It also went beyond the colonial paradigms of the forest bureaucracy to recognise community efforts at protecting and preserving forests. Numerous groups and individuals working...

-The Indian Express With the CBI making its first arrests in the Ishrat Jahan case, Ujjwala Nayudu and Rahul Tripathi look at past investigations, all of which have punctured holes in the Gujarat Police’s encounter theory When were Ishrat Jahan and three others killed? Was it in a police encounter on June 15, 2004, as the Gujarat Police’s records show, or a day earlier, on the evening of June 14, as subsequent...

-The Hindu There is no Lokpal yet, but the Centre’s Grievance Redressal Bill promises to cut through bureaucracy and corruption that plague government services. The citizen is hoping for a repeat of the RTI Act story. A year after the UPA came to power in 2004, it brought the Right to Information Act, ushering in a revolution: citizens, for the first time, could access information under the control of public authorities, whether...