-The Hindu The government’s ill-conceived urban development schemes are threatening the future of Delhi The Delhi Urban Arts Commission was constituted by an Act of Parliament in 1972 with the sole intention of acting as a supra urban body to guide the future development of Delhi. After 40 years of its existence, chaired by a galaxy of bureaucrats and, more recently, famous architects, it is still difficult to evaluate whether it has...

-Outlook The Women and Child Ministry is planning to make changes in the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986 to include electronic media and internet under its purview. At present the legislation only includes depiction of women in publications, WCD secretary Prem Narain told reporters at an interaction here. "We are also thinking of raising the penalties mentioned in the Act, to make them more contemporary," the WCD secretary said, adding that...

-Live Mint The Sonia Gandhi -led National Advisory Council (NAC) may be moving closer to formulating a pre-legislative process that will involve a thorough, time-bound discussion of Bills before they become law. “The need for such a policy of consultation is necessary to evolve from a representative democracy to a participatory, deliberative democracy, particularly for accountability to the people in the formulation of law and policy,” said the draft recommendation of NAC’s working...

-Live Mint CIC suspends hearings to seek govt’s opinion; RTI activists criticize the move, saying it could lead to delays The Supreme Court said on Thursday that information commissions at the central and state levels should have two-person benches, with one person being a “judicial member” and the other an “expert member”. That prompted the Central Information Commission (CIC) to suspend hearings to enable it to seek the government’s opinion and led 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...