The water used to cool the Rawatbhata reacToR was pumped back into Chambal river. Before and during my pregnancy, I drank the tap water supplied to us from the same river. I didn't go even so far as to boil this water. Nothing went wrong. Kudankulam has been in the news and how! Little did I imagine in 2002 that this remote area of southern Tamil Nadu where there are more...

Even as speculation that Communist Party of India (Maoist) Polit Bureau member Koteswara Rao, alias Kishenji, was killed in a fake encounter refuses to die down, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee attempted to clear the air on Friday. “Kishenji's death was not something that we did knowingly. It was an incident that occurred,” Ms. Banerjee told journalists at the State Secretariat. Speaking to journalists after the surrender of leading Maoist leader Suchitra...

-Economic and Political Weekly Strict implementation of NHRC guidelines for investigation into fake “encounters” is a must. The killing of five suspected bank robbers in Chennai on 23 February by police officers tasked with apprehending them looks suspiciously like yet another case of a fake “encounter”. News reports following the killing have brought out various inconsistencies in the claim of the police that they fired in self-defence.   After directives from the National Human...

-The Telegraph Arrested Urdu journalist Mohammad Ahmad Kazmi’s son Shauzab today said his father is being ToRtured by police. “Police are ToRturing him mentally to extract confessional statements from him. My father is innocent and all allegations against him are baseless,” the 21-year-old MBA student told a news conference. “I met him today and he is very scared. He told me police are creating lot of pressure on him to confess something which...

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to immediately order an impartial probe into the role of the Chhattisgarh police in the case of alleged ToRture of tribal teacher Soni Sori, now detained in the Raipur jail on charges of helping Maoists. It wants proper medical facilities provided to the 35-year-old mother, who was ToRtured so badly that “...two foreign body [sic] recovered of size 2.5 x 1.5...