-The Hindu Farmers’ protests interrogate the reigning development model.   Alternatives do exist The recent spate of peasant protests across wide swathes of the country points sharply to the unjust folly and sheer unviability of the path of development that India has embraced, especially in the reform era since the late 1980s. Even, say, a modest food critic in metropolitan India collects an immodest annual pay package which can easily go into seven figures....

-NDTV (with inputs from IANS)   RTI responses on EVMs have highlighted irregularities in everything from the number of voting machines the Election Commission bought to the price it paid for them. New Delhi: Responses to a series of Right to Information requests have thrown up multiple red flags in the Election Commission's acquisition and use of EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines. From huge inconsistencies in the records of the machines acquired...

-The Indian Express The move comes after complaints against banks that they were not intimating eligible farmers whose names along with the amount has been cleared by the state government. mumbai: The state government has decided to directly intimate eligible farmers across 40,913 villages about the loan waiver scheme. The move comes after complaints against banks that they were not intimating eligible farmers whose names along with the amount has been cleared...

-The Indian Express Farmers and activists, who have jointly raised the issue with NHSRC say that they were given “no time” to prepare for the meetings nor are the railway officials presenting the report of impact assessment. Vadodara/ Surat: The National High Speed Rail Corporation (NHSRC), which has begun its meetings with “stakeholders” to assess the social impact and damage from the ambitious Ahmedabad-mumbai “bullet train” project, is facing protests from farmers...

-Livemint.com Crimes against Dalit women constitute the biggest category of crimes against Dalits registered under the SC/ST Act mumbai: A dilution of the stringent provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is going to affect Dalit women far more than men. Nearly a fifth of cases registered under the Atrocities Act are crimes against women. If one excludes the category “others” (which includes various miscellaneous crimes), crimes...