-The Hindu The public now sees the Internet not just in market terms, but as a social phenomenon that requires public interest regulation. In its aggressive campaign for Free Basics, couched in simplistic developmental language, Facebook underestIMAted the political sophistication of the Indian public. It must be regretting it now. The social networking service’s reportedly Rs. 100-crore campaign, through double full-page newspaper advertisements, billboards and television, appears simply to have congealed public...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...

-The Hindu We need to apply a new credo, digital dynamism, that recognises the complex web that is the internet today An unseasonably warm new year has been substituted by a densely spewing fog over the concept of net neutrality. Net neutrality is a specific approach to the economic regulation of the internet. It is based on the premise of the ‘end to end design principle’, in which traffic on the internet is...

-Frontline   Swagata Raha, a senior legal researcher (Consultant) at the Centre for Child and the Law, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, said the Juvenile Justice Bill, 2015, “incorrectly assumes that children are competent to stand trial as adults”. Currently pursuing Master of Studies in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford, Swagata Raha worked extensively on the campaign against the Juvenile Justice Bill and has written extensively...

They say that fact is stranger than fiction, and the fact is that more people in India die annually due to exposure to cold weather rather than because of earthquake, cyclone or torrential rain. Data accessed from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that every year more people die because of 'exposure to cold' than due to landslide, flood or epidemic. The report entitled Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India...