Recent debates on Internet censorship in India have focused to the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don’t apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth. It has been said that the internet can be used to incite...

-The Times of India The Goa state information commission(GSIC) recently directed the accounts department to provide salary details of a government employee to his estranged wife. The government employee had filed a divorce plea in court. The wife had sought the details under the Right To Information Act (RTI) so as to claim maintenance but the government employee had urged the accounts department not to furnish his salary details. Having considered at least...

Ignoring widespread concern over the safety, efficacy and cost of pentavalent vaccines, India’s central health ministry has, this month, approved inclusion of the prophylactic cocktail in the universal immunisation programme in seven of its provinces. Pentavalent vaccine doses, a cocktail of five antigens in a single shot, confers immunity against five paediatric diseases - diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B and haemophilus influenza type b (Hib), with the last one considered particularly...

Rudyard Kipling opens his superb novel with the street urchin Kim teasing the son of a wealthy man. Kim kicks Chota Lal, whose father, Lala Dinanath, is worth half-a-million sterling, off the trunnion of the mighty cannon Zam-Zammah. Kipling loved India and wrote that it was the only democratic place in the world. It warms us to read this, but of course this was quite untrue in Kipling’s time and...

-The Telegraph The government today told a Constitution bench that the right to freedom of speech was for the “benefit” of the public, not the media, as it backed the Supreme Court’s attempt to lay down norms for reporting judicial proceedings. “Freedom of speech is not for the benefit of the press but for the benefit of the public,” additional solicitor-general Indira Jaisingh said, marking a shift from the cautious stand the...