-Express News Service RTI activists across the state have called for a protest at the Dharna Chowk here on Saturday against the appointment of eight information commissioners to the AP Information Commission. Terming the appointment a farce, B Ramakrishna Raju, convenor of the United Forum for RTI Campaign, said that the forum members had met the governor on Thursday and presented the many flaws in the appointments during a 45minute meeting....

Iqbal Masud, the civil servant and critic, supported the ban on The Satanic Verses in 1989. His reason was simple: if the book remained on sale in India, Muslims would march in protest, policemen would fire upon them, some of them would die, and no book, said Masud, was worth the life of a single protester. There were, he allowed, legitimate arguments to be made about incitement, about mobs marching against...

Liquor baron Ponty Chadha’s mercurial rise is all ‘Maya’ A reclusive liquor baron may seem like an anomaly in these never-ending good times. But Gurdeep Singh Chadha—better known by the moniker Ponty Chadha—fits the bill. Often called “Mayawati’s financier”, the 57-year-old Ponty has been making large (if silent) waves for the political patronage he enjoys in Uttar Pradesh. Any bottle of liquor sold in India’s most populous state goes through his...

-The Financial Express   Bhim can't understand what he's done wrong.   Before dawn every day he joins hundreds of wholesale traders at Delhi's Azadpur Mandi, a sprawling, chaotic market where trucks blare Bollywood music, porters haul huge brown sacks of fruit and vegetables and hawkers ply tea and cigarettes. His own trade is in rosy red apples, laced with calcium carbide. Bhim says he's been adding chemicals to his apples for years to artificially ripen...

Last month, the turmeric farmers of Maharashtra's Sangli district found themselves in a desperate situation. Oversupply had resulted in prices crashing in the local turmeric market, Asia's biggest, threatening their livelihood. And with several thousands growing the commodity across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, any meaningful strategy to halt the price crash meant involving a sizeable number of farmers.  That's when local farmer Atul Salunkhe, 31, had a brainwave. How...