-The Economic Times   Information technology minister Kapil Sibal's demand that Facebook and Google screen user-generated content manually before they put it up is impractical and, therefore, unacceptable. But this does not mean that everything he has said should be rejected alongside.  Nor is there any merit in the outcries of outrage over imperilled freedom of expression. Free speech is not unbridled, anywhere. Even the internet companies in question accept this. They say...

In the first high-level red-flag against the UPA government’s flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that while assets created under the NREGA “may or may not have productive use”, the programme was “adversely” impacting the agriculture sector by “drawing out agriculture labourers from agricultural operations”.   In a letter sent to the prime minister late last month, Pawar is...

A.K. Ramanujan, while referring to the diverSITy and apparently contradictory element of unity in the Indian traditions, refers to an Irish joke about whether to classify trousers as singular or plural: singular from the top, plural from the bottom.1 A Concurrent Discipline Course in the UniverSITy of Delhi for Second Year Honours students not doing History was introduced in 2005 on ‘Culture in India—Ancient’, and had sought to very senSITively...

-The Hindu   The BJP is not averse to the idea of a mechanism to curb “offensive and objectionable” material on the social networking webSITes with the approval of Parliament. In response to a specific question here, party Deputy Leader in the Rajya Sabha S.S. Ahluwalia said his party would support any “concrete measures” contemplated by the government to contain material on the internet which could hurt religious sentiments or were defamatory in...

In an interview to The Hindu, he says Internet companies left him with no choice Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has defended his demand that global internet companies block some content from SITes they operate, saying he had been left with no choice after the companies refused to delete incendiary hate-speech published on their social-networking webSITes. In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, Mr. Sibal said Facebook,...