-The Business Standard India's politicians' regrettable response to a 1949 cartoon On Friday, more clearly than ever before, India’s political class revealed its deepest, darkest fear: that someone, somewhere, is smiling. In an enviable feat of cross-party unanimity in this partisan and divided age, India’s parliamentarians decided that a cartoon by that unparalleled chronicler of the birth of independent India, Shankar, was too offensive for a government-sanctioned textbook on modern Indian...

-PTI Resurrecting the issue of cartoons lampooning her sent by email by a Jadavapur University professor, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday claimed it actually contained a message threatening to assassinate her. She also alleged a conspiracy through Facebook, Twitter and SMS and said "I am being shown in Facebook. Now, it is my turn. I will show you Facebook". "Mamata Banerjee is not a cartoon. A section of the media called...

The Government of India has formally launched the news Guidelines of the MGNAREGA based on the Mihir Shah Committee report. The news guidelines include many new works under conservation activities and it strengthens the hands of the village panchayats and gram sabhas. However, the list of works does not include the activities under the system of rice intensification (SRI) which encourages scientific method of paddy cultivation with better yield in...

Rohtak: Children living at a shelter run by an NGO here were sexually abused, beaten, molested and made to work as labourers on farms and construction sites, a raid by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has uncovered. The girls recounted tales of horror during the raid on Wednesday night at the shelter run by NGO Bharat Vikas Sangh, which won a Haryana state award for women's empowerment in...

-PTI Senior IAS officer Pradeep Shukla was today detained here and questioned by the CBI in connection with the multi-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam. A 1981-batch IAS officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, 55-year-old Shukla was detained while on his way to the airport, official sources said, adding the CBI had repeatedly summoned him to appear before the agency for questioning. Though CBI officially maintained that he had neither been detained...