-The Indian Express Over nine years after the Supreme Court asked all States and the Centre to bring in reforms to make the police forces more people-centric than ruler-centric, not much has changed on the ground. Few weeks back, following a spate of crimes against women and children in the city, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted: “Modi-ji, please give up your stubborn attitude and let’s work together. Give police and ACB...

-Hindustan Times Chandigarh/Patiala: After a bumper paddy crop, the fields are on fire in Punjab and Haryana, polluting the air with hazardous particles. Strangely, there wasn’t much hue and cry till a thick blanket of smog — a mixture of smoke and fog — enveloped Delhi, making city residents breathless. It’s the farmers of the two food-bowl States who are being blamed for the sudden deterioration in air quality and smog in...

-Livemint.com India’s agricultural growth rate has hovered around 2-3% annually, when in fact it should be at least 5% India’s agriculture became moribund decades ago, and shows no sign of uplift for the long haul. Indeed, the rain gods have played havoc with Indian farmers. But not just the gods, Indian States have done precious little to tackle the problem head-on. The government’s solution is to give financial sops to farmers...

-The Indian Express Government cannot afford to wait any longer to address the building agricultural distress. The government and the political class seem oblivious to a deepening farm crisis, resulting from back-to-back monsoon failures and falling crop prices. One indicator of the growing agrarian distress is farmer suicides, no longer a phenomenon confined to Vidarbha or Telangana. The current year has seen farmers even in States like Karnataka, Odisha and Madhya...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Maharashtra has been ranked fourth in the country by an index that measures how effectively States have transferred power to panchayats, more than two decades after the Constitution was amended to empower the institution. The rankings are part of a report titled 'How Effective is Devolution across Indian States' compiled by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) for the Panchayati Raj ministry. "The novelty of the...