-The Telegraph   Bengal’s criminal investigation department (CID) has written to Facebook in its efforts to track down those responsible for uploading four Internet pictures lampooning chief minister Mamata Banerjee. If the CID persists with the drive, it will mean that the government is keen to take its crackdown beyond the circulation of unpalatable digital content and to its very source of origin. The CID’s cyber crime cell had earlier written to Facebook and...

-The Business Standard Kolkata arrest shows the IT Act is too easily misused The recent arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, for emailing a comic strip lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, highlighted glaring flaws in the laws that made the arrest possible — the Information Technology (IT) Act, its amendments, and the Rules framed for its implementation. The strip was an innocuous mash-up that combined stock...

-The Indian Express Warning that time was running out to preserve the Ganga, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today pulled up state governments for a tardy performance on sewage treatment and asked them to take action against industries polluting the river. Voicing concern over the discharge of 2,900 million litres of sewage in the Ganga every day, Singh asked state governments to send proposals for new sewage treatment plants and said adequate funding...

As a preventive measure to avoid the recurrence of an NRHM-type scam, the government has worked out an IT-enabled near real-time monitoring network system to keep an eye not only on the fund flow from the Centre to the lowest level but also the physical outcome of expenditure on various Central social sector schemes. The new setup, to be rolled out across India in the next five years, is called the...

On Thursday, April 12, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the provision in the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act — better known as the Right to Education or RTE Act — that makes it compulsory for private schools (including schools that have received no cheap land, one-time subsidy or contribution to ongoing expenses from a government agency) to take in 25% pupils from poor-income backgrounds. It...