The Kerala Town and Country Planning Act, 2016 was considered a pioneering act that aligned with the 74th constitutional amendment. However, in October 2021, this act was amended. This article analytically examines the amendments made with respect to the provisions of the principal act. It discusses how there has been a dilution of important provisions of the act alongside major changes to Kerala’s planning system.
The study examines the legal remedial measures for women trapped in the non-resident Indian marriages under private and public international law as well as the Indian legal and institutional framework, including a comprehensive legislation and a monitoring mechanism in the Prime Minister’s Office.
The true state of fundamental rights in India cannot be determined by reading the judgments of the Supreme Court or the high courts that, though called “constitutional courts,” are not the “only” “constitutional courts” in India. The magistrates and civil judges, despite called the “subordinate courts,” are just as important but receive much less attention in conversations about fundamental rights.
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned out to be the biggest humanitarian disaster of the century. This crisis has been effectuated due to the authoritativeness of the state that has used its powers under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 and the hitherto Epidemic Disease Act, 1897 without paying heed to the decentralisation of powers, devolution of duties, and building community resilience.
Street vendors constitute the most significant and deprived segment of the country’s unorganised sector. Among vendors, the condition of Dalit, women, and child vendors is the most horrific, depressed, and necessitous. Other than being a source of self-employment for the poor, vending is vital to provide convenient, affordable services to the urban populace. It is ironic that the current laws, schemes, and policies are awfully unsympathetic, hostile, and unreceptive towards the ordeals of this section of the urban population. This paper attempts to explore and expose the vulnerability, fragility, and marginalisation of this section under faulty urban governance and development practices by tracking their lives, pains, and plight as vendors.
In 2012, the finance ministry of the Government of India amended the Income Tax Act to tax capital gains from indirect corporate transactions. This law was applied retrospectively, permitting the finance ministry to tax companies for similar transactions in the previous half a century and creating consternation among foreign investors. The ministry decided to dispense with this in August 2021. Despite the altered legal position that this law will apply prospectively instead of retrospectively, the woes of the ministry are not over.
This article explores the ways in which a background of non-discursive practices that are properly describable as a “cultural commons” underlie the very possibility of law and norm in the governance of a social group. This efficacy of these practices provides conceptual sources for a recovery of other forms of the common, such as the land or the environmental commons. The idea of a cultural commons is a distinctive ideal that stands apart from other political and moral ideals, such as liberty, equality, and fraternity. It stands apart from ideals of trust and cooperation. The article specifies how it is related to these, and to other fundamental institutions of modernity, such as capital and the state. As such, it cannot be inserted into constitutions, or directly be the goal of politics. It is a non-optional and non-cancellable ideal, that might be identified with what Marx called “unalienated” life.
