How an image-fixated chief minister has bent the state’s media to his will If you haven’t heard of an income tax raid on the residential premises of Nitish Kumar’s close aide and treasurer of the ruling Janata Dal-United (JD-U), Vinay Kumar Sinha, you are not alone. Thanks to the local media, it took a while even in Patna—where the house is located—for people to get to know. This, incidentally, is the...

Why kill over a people’s dietary preference for beef? “The university and all teaching systems that appear simply to disseminate knowledge are made to maintain a certain social class in power, and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.... The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack...

The implementation of Patents Act, as last amended in 2005, raises significant issues of immediate concern to patients across the world. INDIA'S Patents Act has an interesting hisToRy. Enacted first in 1911 as the Indian Patents and Designs Act in the colonial era, it primarily addressed the interests of invenToRs, who did not want their inventions infringed upon by anyone who copied them or adopted the methods used to make them....

-The Times of India Trinamool Congress men beat a 38-year-old woman, confined her near a temple, ToRe off her clothes and forced her to walk half-naked to her home at Kanaidighi village in Bengal's East Midnapore district. After the ToRture and humiliation in the presence of her 16-year-old son and daughter on Sunday, the woman consumed poison and was admitted to Contai subdivisional hospital. Police put up a barricade around the hospital...

The Centre has cited three shortcomings in the implementation of the rural job scheme in Bengal and linked the next instalment of grant to the resolution of the problems. In a letter sent to chief minister Mamata Banerjee yesterday, Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has identified the critical areas as low completion rate of works, delay in e-transfer of wages and inadequate action on complaints of irregularities. “Let me make it...