By all outward appearances, the controversial Print and Electronic Media Standards and Regulation Bill, 2012, has been shelved. The Congress leadership has already distanced itself from the contents of the Bill, stating that it was solely advanced by Meenakshi Natarajan, the party's Lok Sabha member from Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh. The first-time MP, who is a close aide of party general secretary Rahul Gandhi, refused to comment on the Bill...

We created a textbook that would encourage young citizens to think seriously about politics. But our politicians are not ready for that yet When an emotional issue erupts in the public domain, argument becomes difficult and secondary to decision-making. That is what happened over the controversy regarding the inclusion of a cartoon depicting Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in a class XI textbook. One self-proclaimed inheritor and interpreter of Dr. Ambedkar's legacy ensured...

Jatav residents of Ramgarh in U.P. resist attempts by members of a powerful community to grab their land by violent means. IN what could be considered one of the worst incidents of vendetta against Dalits in the National Capital Region (NCR), members of the Dalit Jatav community were beaten up brutally by some members of the dominant Gujjar community in Ramgarh village in the Greater Noida area of Uttar Pradesh...

-The Times of India Encouraged by usage of the provisions of the Right To Information Act, the government has decided to set up a state-of-the-art call centre and an interactive website to facilitate easy exchange of information related to the transparency law to citizens. The project was envisaged after taking insights from a government study which highlighted inconvenience faced by citizens in exercising their rights to information. According to a department of personnel...

There is a complicated relationship between abortion as such and the selective abortion of female foetuses. This dilemma is one with which the women’s movement in India has been grappling since the late 1980s. In my discussion of this dilemma, I would like to move away completely from Satyamev Jayate, the television programme, (on which a discussion has been initiated by Shohini Ghosh on kafila.org). In any case, there the...