Political and Social Issues:

Child welfare continues to be accorded the least priority in planning and implementation of public services or amenities.
A survey's study shows that only 6 per cent of institutional homes maintain records of abuse cases.
- Less than a fourth of the Juvenile Justice Boards sit on regular working days, while 44 per cent have met only once a week.
- Twenty-eight schools have reported drop-outs due to child labour, while 21 per cent reported dropouts following child marriages.
- Only 29 per cent of the Child Welfare Committees comply with all the requirements of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2000
- Worse, less than 10 per cent police stations have a designated space for dealing with children, 30 per cent of railway security forces have booths that provide assistance to missing and other vulnerable children.
- display of information on child protection issues is observed in less than 10 per cent bus stations while 23 per cent of bus station managers were aware of the Juvenile Justice Act.
The study recommends a national child protection network that would work towards sharing, collating, and developing tools.

In a move aimed at protecting the interests of consumers and prevent frauds in sale of gold jewellery, the Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the proposal to make hallmarking of gold mandatory. At present, hallmarking of gold is voluntary in nature.
The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), under the Consumer Affairs Ministry, is the administrative authority of hallmarking.
The BIS (Amendment) Bill, will empower the government to bring in compulsory certification regime any article and/or process that it considers necessary from the point of view of health, safety, environment and prevention of deceptive practice.
At present, about 77 items, including cement, mineral water and milk products, are certified through mandatory hallmarking under the BIS Act for conformity with expected quality levels.

The latest report of the Department of Telecommunications, prepared by the working group on Telecom for the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17), underlines the urgent need for creating a secure infrastructure for government communication.
Pointing to “capacity constraint” of the current Indian system that allows traffic to flow outside the country, the report says that an investment of Rs.450 crore is needed to “develop and deploy a pan-India secure network and network-based services such as email, VoIP mobile communication through a survivable and available network architecture for secured communication for government use.”
Interestingly, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) already has an internal system of communication that acts like a private Internet system, connecting various centres working on crucial defence projects, thus securing it from any kind of hacking or interception.

The Supreme Court stayed a Delhi High Court judgment holding that licences would be mandatory for the possession of air rifles and air pistols as they would pose danger to animals.
1962 government notification that exempted the air rifle and air pistols from all regulations and controls under the 1959 Arms Act, 1959.
The air guns used for target practice were not firearms as defined under the Act but were merely toys and as such these did not fall under the purview of the licensing regime.

The Central Information Commission (CIC) has held that all information in possession of the office of the Chief Justice of India is not completely exempt from disclosure under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra
Appellant RTI activist had sought a variety of information in 11 cases.
- Some of these questions were about the appointment of some individuals as judges and some others related to questions arising out of the conduct of judges, based upon some newspaper reports.
- No information had been provided by the Supreme Court's Central Public Information Officer (CPIO)
- Appointment procedure is already available in SC website under public domain and still CPIO hesitates to reveal.
CIC said: “It cannot be anybody's case that the change in the procedure of judges should happen completely outside the notice or the knowledge of the citizens of India, and that the citizens of India should not be given an opportunity to articulate their views.
The objective of the RTI Act is precisely to help create an informed citizenry so that it can hold the state and its instrumentalities to account.