As part of its efforts to forecast monsoon better, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) will incorporate readings from one of the latest US climate forecast models that is being improved for Indian conditions. IMD will release its monsoon forecast for this year in the middle of next week, while weather experts from South Asia gathered in Pune will come out with their forecast for the South Asian region on Friday. Advanced countries...

The implementation of Patents Act, as last amended in 2005, raises significant issues of immediate concern to patients across the world. INDIA'S Patents Act has an interesting history. Enacted first in 1911 as the Indian Patents and Designs Act in the colonial era, it primarily addressed the interests of inventors, who did not want their inventions infringed upon by anyone who copied them or adopted the methods used to make them....

-The Business Standard Kolkata arrest shows the IT Act is too easily misused The recent arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, for emailing a comic strip lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, highlighted glaring flaws in the laws that made the arrest possible — the Information Technology (IT) Act, its amendments, and the Rules framed for its implementation. The strip was an innocuous mash-up that combined stock...

Before being a cartoonist/graphic novelist, I am a citizen first. A citizen with the freedom to have feelings — if not the freedom of free speech. Now, the former is far easier than the latter. I have the freedom to have feelings and the freedom to deal with those who hurt my feelings. And on that note, I want Sarojini Naidu arrested. Posthumously, but so be it. In an All India...

-The Telegraph   If you are still not wearing such handcuffs in Bengal, Subha Nava Varsha and read on... Calcutta, April 13: A Jadavpur University professor and a 72-year-old retired engineer have been arrested for allegedly circulating clips of an Internet joke about chief minister Mamata Banerjee and charged with trying to outrage her modesty. Fittingly, the police crackdown got off the ground 40 minutes past the appointed hour for the dreaded midnight knock. The...