KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

-The Hindu What is the trigger for the current conflict? Why did the Supreme Court strike down the law on National Judicial Appointments? What is the government’s grouse against the Collegium system? What is the new CJI planning?  The story so far: A major confrontation is on between the Union government and the Supreme Court over the former’s resentment towards the Collegium system of appointments and its push to have a dominant...

-Hindustan Times The Supreme Court on Friday sought a response from the Centre on a petition calling for a uniform age of marriage of 18 years be fixed for all women, regardless of their religion or personal laws. The plea also urged the court to end the “discrimination” existing between genders on the age of marriage by lowering the age for men to get married from 21 years to be at...

-Hindustan Times Successive governments have “completely destroyed” the independence of the Election Commission of India (ECI) by ensuring no chief election commissioner (CEC) gets the full six-year term to head the poll body since 1996, a Constitution bench in the Supreme Court lamented on Tuesday, adding that absence of a law for appointment of election commissioners (ECs) has resulted in an “alarming trend”. The five-judge bench further remarked that the silence of...

-The Telegraph Leena Gangopadhyay, the chairperson of the commission, who has been touring north Bengal for the past couple of days, has inspected three prospective sites and will soon submit a report to the state women and child welfare department for the final nod Siliguri: The West Bengal Commission for Women has decided to set up a home for destitute girls and women aged 18 years and above in or around Siliguri. Leena...