The Trinamool Congress-led government is “suppressing freedom of expression of the people of West Bengal,” litterateur and Magsaysay awardee Mahasweta Devi said here on Monday. “The people's government has come and done something that was unimaginable in the last 64 years. The people have lost their right to assemble and express their opinion at the Metro channel,” said Mahasweta Devi, who, on earlier occasions, had come out in support of Mamata...

At the technical level, the question is whether the technology deployed for identification will return answers that are unambiguous. THE Unique Identification (UID) project, the national project of the Government of India, aims to give a unique 12-digit number – called Aadhaar – to every citizen of the country, a random number that is generated and linked to a person's demographic and biometric information. The key word is “unique”. Launched in...

CHANDRAWAL, India—Satbir Sharma's wife is dead. His family lives in fear. His father's left leg is shattered, leaving him on crutches for life.   Sharma's only hope lies in a new law that gives him the right to know what is happening in the investigation of his wife's death. Most of all, he wants to know what will happen to the village mayor, now in jail on murder charges. He talks quietly, under...

-The Times of India   The court orders directing Times Now to deposit Rs 100 crore as a precondition for appeal in a defamation case involving Justice P B Sawant appears to have become a rallying point for the media, both electronic and print. On Friday, three top media organizations joined two journalist bodies, Editors' Guild of India and Foundation of Media Professionals, to stress that such orders pose a threat to the...

The Editors Guild of India has expressed its concern at the implications of Monday's ruling of the Supreme Court, rejecting a Special Leave Petition seeking a stay against a high court order asking the Times Now channel to deposit Rs 100 crore as a pre-condition for hearing its appeal. "While recognising that the law of defamation is an important qualification of the fundamental right to freedom of expression, the Guild believes...