It is difficult to explain to Indians the wrongness of collective punishment. This is because our identity is collective, and so is our behaviour This month is the 10th anniversary of the incident at Godhra and the events in Gujarat that followed. When the violence began, it was said that the media had made the violence worse. Often this was by its innocence and sometimes by its malice. Was this true? The...
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Drug trials: Panel for stringent action, docs fined Rs 5,000 each by Milind Ghatwai
Twelve government doctors involved in alleged illegal clinical trials in Indore have been slapped a fine of Rs 5,000 each when a probe committee had recommended stringent action like prosecution and cancellation of licences. The paltry fine has invoked strong reactions from health activists who called the action an eyewash and demanded that the government immediately suspend the doctors if it was serious about penalising them and setting an example. The 12...
More »Just 10% beneficiaries of NREGA are poor, if you believe statistics by Devika Banerji
An inconvenient truth? Or yet another case of shoddy data collection by state agencies? The government is scrambling to prove that it is the latter, after data on the UPA's flagship poverty alleviation programme shows that it may not be reaching its intended beneficiaries, those classified in official-speak as below the poverty line (BPL). A recent note circulated to all state departments by the rural development ministry revealed that only...
More »What to do about internet content?
-The Hindu Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has set off a firestorm of protest by demanding that ‘internet intermediaries' — specifically in this round, four social networking giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft, which enable hundreds of millions of individual users to publish and share on the worldwide web — remove inflammatory content as well as other text and images that might “offend Indian sensibilities.” As in...
More »223 lions, 193 leopards died in Gir in last four years by Roxy Gagdekar
Even as Gujarat prides itself as the only home to the Asiatic lions in India at Gir National park, as many as 223 lions and 193 leopards have died in the sanctuary since 2006-07. The last census of lions in 2010 revealed that there were 411 lions in the Gir Sanctuary. In reply to an application filed under the Right to Information Act (RTI), the office of the chief forest conservator...
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