Indian Journal of Law and Human Behavior

Recent evidence pertaining to the post-liberalization period, 1991–1997, clearly suggests that despite a significant increase in per capita income, rural poverty did not decline appreciably. This is mainly due to increased inequality not only vis-à-vis the urban areas but also within the rural population. This paper tries to unfold the relations among governance, sustainable development, poverty, and role of judiciary.

The free trade initiatives led by The South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) was claimed to be a gigantic step towards escalating the trade and economic cooperation in the South Asian region. It has been a long time since the commencement of SAFTA and the progress made in trade between SAARC countries has not been satisfactory. Keeping that in the mind, the author intents to evaluate the situation responsible for this scrawny progress in trade. However, before that it will be pertinent to analyze the provisions with respect to Regional Trade Agreements in WTO jurisprudence and then to put them in contrast with  SAFTA, to give a clearer picture of  South Asian Trade regionalism. 

Death Penalty is a type of punishment where the convict is sentenced to death. It prima facie seems to be very harsh. It is given in the rarest of rare cases. There is huge uproar among the public whether to abolish death penalty or not. Death penalty takes away the Right to Life of the convicts.It is given in very serious cases like waging war against the state. In the article the author has analyzed the hanging of Yakub Memon who was involved in 1993 Mumbai Serial Blasts. There are many philosophers who have stated the importance of death sentence in the society. The justification of the criminalization process of death penalty has been taken into consideration in the article. There were Law Commissions set up for the analysis of death penalty in India. There is a drastic change in the view of the courts regarding capital punishment. Time and again the courts went through the societal conditions before giving the judgment in the death penalty cases. The author has described the inadequacies in the administrative set up. The author has taken the views both for and against capital punishment in order to come to a conclusion. The author will employ doctrinal method of research. 

The 2001 census of India shows the number of married couples to be 173,044,576 [1]. Due to the change in the lifestyle and the pattern of living in today’s times, the number of couples who have various medical problems in conceiving has risen tremendously. The recent National Family Health Survey, for example, estimates childlessness as 2.4 percent of currently married women over 40 in India, one in every six couples being infertile [2]. These people, including other couples who may not have had children due to other reasons, then resort to other measures like adopting a child, surrogacy etc. This paper is thus a humble attempt to provide a comparative analysis of these two above mentioned options i.e adoption and surrogacy with respect to India and discusses the several aspects with reference to feasibility, cost etc. Last but not the least, the legal provisions highlighting the lacunae in the respect to various personal laws would also be dealt with in detail.

Keywords: Poverty; Tendulkar Committee Report; Planning Commission; Constitution; Supreme Court Etc.

India is a signatory of the UN Convention on the Rights of Person with Disability (UNCRPD).The three important obligations arises out of the convention namely, implementation of provisions of UNCRPD, harmonization of Indian Laws with UNCRPD and preparation of a country report by 2010. Critical analysis  of the Right of  Persons with Disabilities Bill,2014 and taking into consideration the extent of compliance and  with the obligations imposed by UN Convention on rights of persons with disabilities thereby, reflecting the substantive contribution of the convention to disability law in India. While disability rights are at this nascent stage, both as legal and academic concepts, the need to strengthen and deepen our understanding of the disability agenda is urgent, especially, if we are to strategically promote disabled peoples’ distinctive needs and experiences within the broader equality debate [1]. At the same time that the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was enacted in Britain, the PWD Act came into force in India from 1 January 1996. Prior to this, disability-related discrimination was never addressed in India either in the Constitution under Chapter III, which contains the fundamental rights, or by any other statute. The Constitution, while protecting equality under Articles 14, 15, and 16, does not include disability as one of the categories for non-discrimination. The only mention of protection of persons facing disability and sickness was made in the Directive Principles of State Policy in Chapter IV of the Constitution (there is no guarantee from the State to prevent discrimination due to disability)[2]. The present Right of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014 and PWD Act was itself an outcome of India’s obligations as a signatory to the Proclamation on the Full Participation and Equality of People with Disabilities in the Asia and Pacific Region, adopted at the meeting to launch the Asian and Pacific Decade of Disabled Persons 1993-2002, convened by the Economic and Social Commission for Asian and Pacific Region, held at Beijing from 1 to 5 December 1992. Therefore, the CRPD would also give impetus for a review and amendment of the PWD Act and Right of Person with Disability Bill, 2014 to incorporate its new principles and requirements. Fundamental rights such as the right to education and the right to employment and livelihood that essentially stem from the right to life guaranteed in Article 21 do not specifically address disability related issues. It is only in the Directive Principles of State Policy under Article 39A & 41 that disability is briefly mentioned [3]. These principles direct the State through this article to make effective provisions for securing the right to work, to education, and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness disablement. Justice Sinha notes that even the provisions of Article 41 should be implemented in consonance with the complementary principles of non-discrimination and reasonable differentiation [4]. Article 39A imposes upon the State a duty to ensure that “opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities”. 5The only legislation enacted prior to the PWD Act and Right of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014, which covered persons with disabilities, was the Mental Health Act of 1987. This Act does not address the issues of legal capacity and rights of persons with mental disabilities, but only provides for their guardianship and institutionalization and, therefore, cannot be considered as a legislation addressing disability-based discrimination. Persons with disability were included in welfare schemes and were referred to as ‘physically handicapped’ or ‘PH’. Token affirmative measures were taken by the State in reserving posts in government services that is civil services legislations, purely as welfare measures and not as antidiscrimination measures. However, this was very limited and the extent of reservation for persons with disability was not uniform throughout the country.  In this context, the enactment of the PWD Act is remarkable because for the first time in India since 1995, social and economic rights of persons with disability have been addressed by any statute. One can say that it has the potential to probably become India’s first anti-discrimination law, or in the words of Fredman, an ‘equality law’.6