A senior journalist, who was recently caught in the Radia tapes lobbying along with some other journalists for some important persons vis-à-vis 2G spectrum controversy, admitted what they did was “utterly unprofessional.” The draft report of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which went into the spectrum allocation deal, claimed under the heading “role of media and whistleblowers”: “When the committee sought the response of a senior journalist about these taped conversations,...

Bill to create independent nuclear authority soon On a day when the world marked the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, India reaffirmed its commitment to an ambitious nuclear energy plan by pushing ahead with the first phase of the controversial nuclear power plant project at Jaitapur in Maharashtra with additional safety measures and a “generous new compensation package” to be announced soon. But in a concession to heightened public awareness...

The activism of civil society against corruption has caught the imagination of many Indians. Arguments put forward by representatives of the civil society organisations (CSOs) can be summarised as follows: 'All - at least most - politicians, ministers, bureaucrats are corrupt. Voters are incapable of deciding what is good for them. The police, Central Bureau of Investigation and the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, and all other agencies of the State...

India is seeking a postponement of the decision on a global ban on Endosulfan to the next meeting of the conference of parties to the Stockholm Convention in 2013, according to observers. C. Jayakumar and Dr. Mohammed Asheel, observers from Kerala to the ongoing conference of parties to the Convention in Geneva, said in an email message that India had distributed a draft of its proposal among the Asia Pacific group...

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...