-PTI In a huge relief to Maharashtra government, the judicial commission of inquiry looking into the Adarsh housing scam has held that the land on which the controversial building stands belongs to the state and not the Army. The two-member panel, which had submitted its interim report to the government last Friday, has also held that the building was not reserved for war heroes and Kargil widows. The interim report was discussed by...

-IANS   Question: Why did Mamata Banerjee cross the road? Answer: To see if the chicken were making fun of her! In mid-April, the chief minister of West Bengal went viral with a vengeance. Hundreds of tweets (like the one above by @harqblack) carried the trendy #arrestmenow tag. Courting arrest got a new meaning. Now, Mamata is not the first to go viral. But such speed is usually found in other celebrity and entertainment domains. But...

-The Business Standard Kolkata arrest shows the IT Act is too easily misused The recent arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, for emailing a comic strip lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, highlighted glaring flaws in the laws that made the arrest possible — the Information Technology (IT) Act, its amendments, and the Rules framed for its implementation. The strip was an innocuous mash-up that combined stock...

Aamra ekhon-o boli ni kon kagoj porte hobe, kintu agami dine kintu setao bole debo. (Till now, we haven’t told which newspapers must be read, but in the future, we will do that as well.) – West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, speaking on March 29 in defense of her government’s decision to bar all but 13 newspapers from more than 2,400 government-approved libraries across the state. “Kunal Ghosh, associate editor...

On Thursday, April 12, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the provision in the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act — better known as the Right to Education or RTE Act — that makes it compulsory for private schools (including schools that have received no cheap land, one-time subsidy or contribution to ongoing expenses from a government agency) to take in 25% pupils from poor-income backgrounds. It...