The Supreme Court has directed food commissioners N C Saxena and Harsh Mandar to visit three interior villages of Chhattisgarh's Dantewada district along with the collector. This comes on a day when a delegation of 10 Congress MLAs made a bid to reach the villages but were turned back citing 'security concerns', 50 kilometres short of their destination. The three villages - Tadmetla, Morepalli and Teemapuram - have been in the...

This article explores the issue of dalits’ inclusion in the media industry. It argues that under-representation of dalits in Indian media leads to an exclusion of news on dalits. [This was presented in the “National Conference on Ethical Issues and Indian Media” held on 26 and 27 November 2010 and in Periyar University, Salem, Tamil Nadu.] [J Balasubramaniam (balumids@gmail.com) is with the Department of Journalism and Science Communication, Madurai Kamaraj University.] The basis...

Why don’t we see more Indian language content on the internet? For instance, there are over 200 odd million people who can read and write in Hindi. But Hindi doesn’t figure in any listing of the top ten languages used on the internet globally. Japanese, a cussedly difficult language to read or write, makes it to the top five. This, from a country with less than one-tenth the population of India. It...

Lauri Myllyvirta, the Finnish Greenpeace campaigner who visited the Jaitapur nuclear power project area in Ratnagiri district last year, has denied that he showed any films or other material like photos to the local people agitating against the project. In an email interview from Indonesia, Mr. Myllyvirta said these claims were absurd. He visited the area on November 20, 2010 and left the next day. On Monday, Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan...

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...