A child is God's gift and none must try to know its sex in advance, said the Bombay high court on Thursday while upholding a civic circular which disallows portable ultrasonography machines to be taken to patients homes. The court's observation assumes significance in the light of recent media reports on female foeticide. A division bench of Justices PB Majmudar and Mridula Bhatkar were hearing a petition filed by the Radiology...

Father Cedric Prakash is a human rights and peace activist based in Ahmedabad. He has campaigned for the justice of the victims of the 2002 communal violence on peril of being publicly branded as “non-Gujarati and non-Hindu” by chief minister Narendra Modi. A resident of Gujarat for nearly 40 years, Prakash is the founding director of Prashant, a centre for human rights, peace and justice. He was named Chevalier of the...

For some people, life is all about a fried hollow globe with a thumb-jabbed hole in the middle. Hot, sour, sweetened or served in dahi (curd), phuchkas are a part of growing up. Unfortunately, the men who sell the phuchkas don’t know where the next jab will come from. Their thumb, or the sudden snatch of officials. Reason: there’s no law to protect them from harassment for selling their stuff on streets. But things...

-The Hindu   If the proposed Lokpal Bill intends to address corruption in high places, the UPA government, as part of its anti-graft campaign, plans to introduce a Citizens Right to Grievance Redress Bill to complement it in the coming winter session of Parliament. At a joint press conference, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh and Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions V. Narayanswamy stressed that it would go beyond the...

Until about a year ago, the number of Indians who knew the name of Kisan Baburao Hazare, popularly known as Anna Hazare, ran into a few thousand -- small change in a country of a billion people. The former army driver was known for his peculiar experiments of social reform in a village in Maharashtra, in western India. He had received national awards for his social work. By the end of...