-The Times of India Giving a new lease of life to various recommendations on police reforms including abolition of 'orderly' system in police force and evaluating quality of service at police stations by citizens, the Centre has written to states asking them to take action on several 'measures' relating to over four dozen 'functional areas' of policing which may help in improving 'law and order' machinery. Though a number of suggestions had...

-Outlook The death of 39 rhinos in and around the world-famous Kaziranga National Park in less than 10 months has brought to the fore the threat faced by the endangered animal. The threat comes from poachers, who kill the rare one-horned rhinoceros for its prized horn whose price in the international market varies from Rs 40 lakh to Rs 90 lakh, and flood which is an annual occurrence in Assam. Early last month,...

-Economic and Political Weekly  The Government of India is considering a proposal to notify farming as an essential service. This is ostensibly to bring drought relief to farmers suffering from a weak monsoon - a laudable goal indeed. However, if farming is deemed an "essential service", farmers and farm workers could lose many of their political and civic rights because the government can then invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act to...

Between 2009 and February 2011, at least 14 people were charged with sedition in India London: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013. In late August the government’s department of telecommunications, citing the “communal tensions” around Assam, blocked more than 300 individual web addresses, including the Twitter profile pages of some journalists. It also ordered a limit...

-The Times of India As many as 37 people have been arrested in connection with rumour mongering during Assam conflict that led to exodus of people from the northeast from various cities, the government told Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. Of these, 24 persons were arrested by Karnataka police in connection with 17 cases filed in the state on the issue. The rest were arrested by Pune police which has registered cases against...