A FACT-FINDING team under the banner of Bhumi Adhikar Andolan visited Bharatpur, Alwar, Rajsamand and Udaipur in Rajasthan on January 6-7, 2018 to look into the increasing incidents of lynching and attacks in the name of gau-raksha, encounter killings, deliberate communal polarisation and attacks on Muslims in the state.

THE Special Court judge Saini in his judgements running into thousands of pages on the 2G spectrum issue, seems to believe that let alone criminality, there was nothing wrong with the procedures that A Raja and his cronies adopted. His world, in which the allotment of 2G licenses or spectrum occurred, appears to be in a parallel universe from that in which the Controller of Auditor General (CAG), the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court operated. All of them found A Raja and his close associates guilty of arbitrary changing of rules to help certain favoured companies.

THE Tribune newspaper published an investigative report on January 4 about how its reporter could get access to details of more than one billion Aadhar numbers.  The reporter paid Rs 500 through Paytm to a vendor after which a gateway was created with a login ID and password which enabled her to get any name, address, photo, phone number and email-id of a person registered with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).Though biometric data was not made available, this explosive revelation has debunked the stand of UIDAI and the central government that its database canno

ON January 1, Jana Natya Manch (JANAM) and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) jointly organised a cultural programme and public meeting to commemorate the 29th Martyrdom Day of Comrade Safdar Hashmi at Dr Ambedkar Park, Jhandapur in Sahibabad Site IV.Comrade Safdar and Ram Bahadur, a worker, were killed in a fatal attack on JANAM orchestrated by Congress supported local goons in Jhandapur on Jan 1, 1989. Since then, JANAM has been going back to the same spot to observe, along with the trade union comrades and local workers, the legacy of Comrade Safdar’s creative and political work.

IN assessing the impact of the Modi government’s demonetisation measure on the black economy, the fact that nearly 99 per cent of the outlawed currency came back to the RBI has been widely taken to indicate that the measure was a failure – its costs far outweighing any benefits. The obvious reason for this is that the return of almost all the notes establishes the fact that hardly any black wealth was destroyed as its immediate direct outcome.