Food minister K.V. Thomas is examining the possibility of bringing in a law to contain the wastage of food at weddings and other social gatherings. Will such a law be feasible, wonders Hemchhaya De The gala British royal wedding might have gripped the world, but are big, fat Indian weddings justified? It’s a poser that the Indian food minister, some senior Congress leaders and former bureaucrats are trying to deal with...

50 lakh tonnes of rice and wheat for all States/Union Territories at BPL prices Need to strike a balance between excess procurement and storage: Justice Bhandari ‘Whatever you procure, store it properly. The rest you can distribute to starving people' Responding to the concern expressed by the Supreme Court over malnutrition and starvation deaths, the Centre on Tuesday informed it of the decision to make an additional allocation of 50 lakh tonnes of...

Indian human rights activist Binayak Sen has accused the government of misusing the country's sedition laws "to silence voices of dissent". In an interview with the BBC, he said that the laws were an outdated relic from the country's colonial past. Dr Sen was freed from jail in the state of Chhattisgarh earlier this month. He had been sentenced to life in prison in December for helping Maoist rebels. The government is reportedly...

Free speech advocates and Internet users are protesting new Indian regulations restricting Web content that, among other things, can be considered "disparaging," "harassing," "blasphemous" or "hateful." The new rules, quietly issued by the country's Department of Information Technology earlier this month and only now attracting attention, allow officials and private citizens to demand that Internet sites and service providers remove content they consider objectionable on the basis of a long list...

Indian Social Action Forum, Janhastakshep, People's Union for Civil Liberties, All-India Students Association and other citizens' groups jointly staged a protest demonstration near Maharashtra Sadan here on Monday condemning the detention and harassment of yatris taking part in the anti-nuclear yatra in Maharashtra. In a memorandum to the Resident Commissioner of Maharashtra, the protesters demanded that there be no interruption in the route of the yatra and also an end to...