In a stark reminder of the exploitation of street children, a new study has found that one out of every five street urchins in Delhi is a rag picker. With most adults unwilling to do the work of rummaging through the city's garbage, an overwhelming number of children have been driven to do it. About 15% children are street vendors, while 15% depend on begging for their living. With the country...

Free speech advocates and Internet users are protesting new Indian regulations restricting Web content that, among other things, can be considered "disparaging," "harassing," "blasphemous" or "hateful." The new rules, quietly issued by the country's Department of Information Technology earlier this month and only now attracting attention, allow officials and private citizens to demand that Internet sites and service providers remove content they consider objectionable on the basis of a long list...

When her parents found a groom for her last August, young BPO executive Pratiksha Sharma was reconciled to the idea of arranged marriage but not to any possible dark sides in her would-be husband’s past. So the 25-year-old BBA graduate secretly got in touch with Manish Kumar, her family lawyer in hometown Meerut, who tossed the idea of checking her future life partner’s background using the Right to Information Act...

The incidents of children going missing from the capital are showing an increasing trend this year with statistics showing that five minors disappear every day compared to three last year. So far this year, a total of 541 children were either kidnapped or went missing from the capital. This month alone, 164 cases were registered while last month the figure was 166. The latest case was that of one-and-half-year-old Ishaan, son of...

A three-day Tarapur-Jaitapur anti-nuclear plant yatra was stopped the moment it began and hundreds of activists were detained at Boisar in this district on Saturday. Activists and supporters, including Justices (retired) B G Kolse-Patil and P.B. Sawant, social activist Vaishali Patil, and Admiral (retd) L Ramdas, were whisked away in police vans from Panchmarg Tarapur, where they had addressed a public meeting in the morning. They were brought to the Boisar...