JGU Digital Archive

This article investigates judicial developments in the Indian law of succession whereby laws have recently been interpreted by the courts to grant more property rights to Indian women. Tribal women who had been denied inheritance rights under their customary laws have been judicially granted rights in their favour. Also, the applicability of coparcenary claims by Hindu daughters, granted under the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 (IND), has now been finally settled by the Supreme Court ...

AV Dicey treated amending power in written constitutions as an adjunct of sovereignty and he treated the body charged with the power of amending the constitution as the repository of sovereignty in the system – not any different in quality from the paradigm: the British Parliament. Debates of a piece with those surrounding parliamentary sovereignty reincarnate in systems with written constitutions as debates about the amending body’s power to amend the written constitution. This essay examine...

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) has been impactful in international law scholarship. However, many of its epistemic approaches, especially its active historicising, have often turned counterproductive to its objective of securing freedom for the peoples of the Third World. Moreover, pursuing the colonial past through weighty polemics has rendered TWAIL a discourse that engenders anti-Western sentiments. Further, TWAIL’s dialectic means of resistance and opposition to a pas...

Under the loom of extreme climatic perturbations, human expansion and rising demand, world’s freshwater reserves are expected to suffer severe setbacks in the coming years. A major task for the international authorities in this regard is to develop a reliable inventory of existing potable water sources and identify the challenges therein. The main objective of this study was to present a spatial summary of ‘safe’ water sources in India using the most ‘authentic’, cross-sectional, open-sourced...

A major obstacle for the developing nations to meeting the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG: 2015e2030) for WaSH (Water-Sanitation-Hygiene) is the appalling rural-urban inequality in infrastructural facilities that lead to regional/spatial differences in livelihood. In India, where about 70% of the population dwells in villages, rural-urban inequality can pose steep challenges to the authorities in their motto of ensuring improved water and sanitation for all. Cognizant of t...

Recent data and policy analysis show that a positive policy and political culture towards non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been developed in China which will lay the foundation for the internationalisation of Chinese NGOs. The changes in global governance, both in terms of a power shift from Western countries to emerging powers and in terms of the Chinese government’s more assertive role in global governance, require that Chinese NGOs play a more active role in global affairs. In re...

In general, most people display stronger beliefs in ‘aggravated rape‘ or ‘real rape‘; including victims of such rape cases who often identify themselves as ‘rape victims’ than the victims of ‘simple rape’, where none of the aggravating circumstances are present. Despite myths to the contrary these ‘simple rape’ cases in fact make up the majority of cases. This article considers the implications of ‘real rape‘ and demonstrates how notions about what a ‘typical rape‘ should be, in the form of r...

Women’s economic status and social security is influenced by their ownership and control over immovable property. Contemporary Indian society has refused to give up traditional ideologies and perpetuates the age-old pattern of ownership of material assets. Despite some progressive interpretations and statutory law, justice with respect to property has not progressed in a linear trajectory for Indian women, particularly Hindu women. This article examines the scheme of succession for Hindu male...

Christian constitute the third major population in India after Hindu and Muslim but still has been not able to act as influential group either socially or politically to draw sufficient attention of the Legislature to their problems in personal law particularly in field of succession. Majority of Christians are governed by the Indian Succession Act, 1925 (ISA, 1925) in matters of succession. The ISA, 1925 guided by patriarchal mindset allows unfairness to women in intestate succession. The ir...

Consumption of tobacco and exposure to tobacco smoke cause death, disease and disability. India has a strong legal regime to regulate tobacco activity and to protect the rights of non-smokers. It, inter alia, prohibits smoking of tobacco in public places. Landmark court decisions have held that smoking of tobacco in public places is unconstitutional and violates the right to life of non-smokers. The law, however, is not implemented effectively. Participation of the general public is critical ...

The objective of this article is to subject the proposition that the office of the Indian President has been reduced to, what in India is sometimes referred to as, a “rubber-stamp” office, whereby the President is mostly a ceremonial head of state without any active participation in the inner workings of the executive or legislative business of the country to close scrutiny via a lens of constitutional law. This article is divided into two parts. Part I of this article closely examines the Ce...

The understanding and application of Economics as a discipline is somewhat facing an existential crisis at the moment. For far too long, our understanding of a value free economics, by value based practitioners has been shaped in form of a collection of models designed to empirically analyse the causal relationships of economic problems affecting a humanoid world. In the history of modern economics, particularly since the early 20th century, the injection of mathematics and statistics in the ...

The present Article shall trace out the changing landscape of eyewitness testimony amidst constantly evolving technology, while focusing on the interplay between memory and eyewitness testimony. It shall further evaluate the impairments to testimonial credibility, leading to several wrongful convictions, while highlighting the role of the Innocence Project in getting some of these convictions overturned. The Article shall conclude by describing ways in which the legal system can reduce and pr...

In April 2016 it was reported that the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) decided not to invest in the development of the Imphal Jiribam and Imphal-Kohima highways (which link Manipur to Assam and Nagaland respectively) due to a law and order situation. The JICA was originally supposed to invest approx. 740$ million in the project but ultimately stalled it due to the increase in frequency of attacks across the conflict affected borderland areas of the North East (India). The nature...

The definition of consideration in Section 2(d) of the Indian Contract Act 1872 substantially anticipated the far-reaching reforms to the orthodox doctrine of consideration that were proposed by the English Law Revision Committee (1937). These included making enforceable, through the doctrine of promissory estoppel, promises without consideration in the traditional sense that were meant to and did induce reliance; making enforceable a promise to perform a pre-existing duty; and making binding...

Objective of this study was to reconnoitre existing rural water supply infrastructure in West Bengal between 2009 and 2014, which is indispensable for laying out the strategies for sustainable water management and human development but currently is lacking. Results indicated that West Bengal ranked 21st in India in 2014 in terms ofreceiving ‘full coverage’ (FC: 40 litres of piped water supply per capita per day; lpcd) as compared to 11th in 2009. In districts of Bardhaman, Birbhum, Cooch Biha...

Building upon current interest in studies of how popular culture relates to global politics, this article examines one hitherto overlooked aspect of popular culture: computer games. Although not prominent in the field of International Relations (IR), historical strategy computer games should be of particular interest to the discipline since they are explicitly designed to allow players to simulate global politics. This article highlights five major IR-related assumptions built into most singl...

Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, was one of the strongest typhoons to hit the Philippines in recent history, killing over 6000 people when it made landfall in November 2013. The international humanitarian response was fast and expansive, with post-response evaluations noting it as largely successful. This study, however, reveals a disconnect between international humanitarian and affected-community understandings of effectiveness, and roots the division in an under-acknowledged diffe...

What happens when queers become democracy’s ‘favourite minority’ championed by the capitalists, the liberals, the conservatives, and the leftists, all singing in the language of rights? It marks the inauguration (or culmination?) of a moment that is not bad but dangerous. The common-sense opposite of bad is good—and the good in this situation, of all of these apparently oppositional political positions becoming strange bedfellows to turn queers into rights-bearing subjects, as I will argue, i...