2013

Of late 580 well-trained women are ready to move into the most difficult terrain of Bihar, the mostly Naxal-infested Rohatas district and its surrounding areas. These brave women were trained as the first female battalion of the military police with a twin purpose. One, to fight against the Maoists in the different districts, and two, to address the steeply increasing violence and criminal activities against the female populace. Nitish Kumar believes that women’s battalion depicts women’s (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Non-discrimination and Equality in India: Contesting Boundaries of Social Justice by Vidhu Verma; New York: Routledge; 2012; xv+pp.269; £ 85.00 $36, hdbk; ISBN: 978-0-415-67775-2
The book under review is an unprecedented work on the subject as it has set an agenda in the very opening line of the introduction that the concept of social justice is familiar to most Indians but one whose meaning is not always understood as it signifies a variety of government strategies designed (…)

by M. MANISHA
The recent debates surrounding parlia-mentary inefficacy raise several important, but unanswered, questions: why don’t MPs participate in parliamentary proceedings on a regular basis? Why do they actively obstruct parliamentary work? Has the inefficiency of Parliament led to the rise of alternative forums of deliberation? If so, what are these and are they capable of building legitimate democratic consensus?
It is popularly believed that MPs are least interested in (…)

Introduction
Japan went to the polls on December 16, 2012 to elect members to the Lower House of the Diet, the more powerful of the two legislative bodies, and elected Abe Shinzo of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) with a two-thirds majority, thereby ending the three-year honeymoon in power by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which saw three Prime Ministers, all ineffective in their own ways. Abe is the seventh Prime Minister in six years, a record that no democratic country can feel (…)

by SHOUVIK CHANDA
The CPI-M has returned to power in Tripura with a decisive victory. However, certain facts need to be brought into focus.
On February 12 at a press conference in Agartala, the CPI-M’s Tripura State Committee Secretary Bijon Dhar had assured that all the demands of the State Government employees would be met once the party came back to power. All the major city newspapers flashed the news on February 13 only to find the State Party Secretary turning (…)

Predictably Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s Union Budget 2013-14 has evoked mixed reactions.
However, if one takes a close look at what the Finance Minister has done, it becomes clear even to the lay observer as to who he has tried to placate. True, he has imposed a 10 per cent surcharge on income tax for crorepatis as also domestic and foreign firms with taxable income above Rs 10 crores, besides increasing exise duty on SUVs, duty on imported automobiles and yachts. He has also (…)

The Union Budget is the largest single economic event of the year for the nation. It sets the direction for the economy for the coming year. Hence it is keenly watched by the public. The Union Budget for 2013-14 projects an expenditure of 14.6 per cent of the GDP for that year, that is, Rs 16,65,297 crores. This is a huge sum of money and as usual the FM doled it out in dribs and drabs to every politically important section of the nation. In the Part A of his speech which presents the (…)

Every year the Economic Survey of the current year is released just before the Union Budget for the coming year is presented to Parliament in order to make people aware of its background, problems and difficulties, and appreciate the efforts of the government to tackle them. This time it is, to an extent, different from the last Survey in an important sense. It exhibits a great deal of seriousness as compared to the childish-ness seen in the preceding survey. This is simply because the (…)

DOCUMENT Need for a Progressive Fiscal Policy in India: Need to increase Tax-GDP Ratio Stop favouring the Corporates at the cost of the Toiling Masses Decentralisation and Self-Reliance through Resource Allocation Unorganised Workers: Contribution—65 per cent of GDP, Allocation—0.01 per cent Budget-making with a Bottom-up Approach.
These demands resonated at a Press Conference organised jointly by National Alliance of People’s Movements and People’s Budget Initiative at Bhopal on February (…)

Professor Lotika Sarkar, 91, a widely-known pioneer in the fields of law, women’s studies and human rights, passed away in New Delhi on February 23, 2013. She taught criminal law and conflict of laws at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi and was an active member of the Indian Law Institute. She was a member of the Government of India‘s Committee on the Status of Women in India and had been a founding member of several institutions—the Indian Association for Women Studies and the Centre for Women‘s Development Studies. Her husband, veteran journalist Chanchal Sarkar, predeceased her more than seven years ago. While remembering her we are publishing a tribute by one of her distinguished students, who is now herself a Professor of Law, and a message we received from Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, the retired Supreme Court judge, mourning her demise.