The Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate on Tuesday declared that the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team had not found any evidence for prosecuting Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and top bureaucrats and police officers and recommended that the investigation in the 2002 Gulberg Society massacre case be closed. Though magistrate M.S. Bhatt did not pronounce the court's decision on the closure report, he ordered the SIT to give a copy of it, within...

The government should immediately announce a 10% increase in the floor price of cotton and rice to protect farmer incomes if it imposes a ban on the export of these commodities, India's two most economically significant cash crops, according to the Commission of Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), a body which advises the government on the pricing policy for major farm produce. "Any ban on export is an implicit tax on...

To plug loopholes in the law on maternity benefits, a government panel has suggested an amendment forbidding the sacking of a pregnant employee on any ground.  The Planning Commission's working group which had been asked to review the Maternity Benefit Act 1961 has also recommended increasing the duration of maternity leave, though it did not specify by how days it should be increased.  The group wants the government to incorporate a clause...

Inaccuracy in reporting court proceedings has caused friction between the press and the legal community On the morning of 10 August 2011, senior lawyer Harish Salve looked upset as he entered Chief Justice of India (CJI) S.H. Kapadia’s courtroom, holding a newspaper that had published an article on a case he was arguing in the Supreme Court. Salve complained that the article in question, written by a journalist at news agency Press...

There is no case whatsoever to construct a single poverty line based on a calorie or expenditure norm; all such lines are arbitrary and do not take into account the different dimensions of poverty. It is far better to focus on disaggregated information on a variety of parameters – education, housing, clothing, health, etc – which can give us unambiguous information about the different facets of poverty over the course...