The draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill 2011, proposed by the NAC, has attracted welcome debate. Any legislative measure, intended to correct a historical wrong, should indeed be subject to the closest scrutiny to improve and strengthen it. For if we get this right it can help realise, far better than we have so far, the constitutional guarantees of equality before the law. This bill is built on India’s...

A sensational story in Hindustan Times about surgeons in Indore performing hundreds of sex change operations on children turns out to be false and misleading. An investigation.   Last month, a Hindustan Times front page report claiming that Indore doctors were converting hundreds of baby girls into baby boys sent shock waves through the system, with everyone from the Prime Minister's Office to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights...

The communal violence bill prepared by the National Advisory Council (NAC) seeks fundamentally to change how the government deals with violence against minorities. The bill focuses on religious and linguistic minorities as well the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but religious minorities are at its heart. The bill has some undeniable strengths, but it suffers from two analytically fatal flaws. First, it places excessive faith in the state machinery. Though...

-The Hindu Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Tuesday urged representatives of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) to ensure best use of the funds allocated for the rural areas so that these areas could come up at par with urban areas. Mr. Hooda was addressing the sarpanches and other PRIs representatives who had converged at his residence here to thank him for devolution of powers to the panchayats. He said that his...

There will soon be a new set of glass doors at Krishi Bhavan. The newly elevated Cabinet Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh plans to bring the doors — a signature element of his interior décor right from his early days at the Commerce Ministry — to his new office. Over the last two tumultuous years at the Environment Ministry, those doors have symbolised the transparency and accessibility he claims...