The Lokayukta is the “government’s conscience”, an anti-corruption ombudsman organised at the state-level and born out of a need felt among the country’s statesmen to instill a sense of public confidence in the transparency of the administrative machinery. Legal experts say that the “best and the worst” of the Lokayukta organisation is that the success of the entire mechanism depends solely on the “personal qualities such as the image, caliber, drive,...

On Tuesday, readers awoke to the Capital’s night of horror. A young girl, Asha, and her lover, Yogesh, were tortured to death by her family members inside her home, even as neighbours chose to shut out the victims’ screams. Those who tried to intervene were brushed off by family members claiming it was a ‘private matter’. This gruesome crime, committed in the name of ‘family honour’, raises three important questions. First,...

Umesh Kumar and his wife Satvati Devi were woken in the middle of the night by loud cries coming from the neighbouring house. "She was crying loudly. She was pleading, 'Kill me, but please don't hurt him.' She loved him and they wanted to get married," Ms Devi tells me. Two days after teenage lovers Asha and Yogesh were brutally killed, Swaroop Nagar colony on the north-western outskirts of the...

India lives in its villages, Gandhi said. But increasingly, the people of India are dying on its roads. India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006 and has continued to pull steadily ahead, despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries. While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years,...

The 23-year-old criminal trial of the Bhopal gas tragedy will see the verdict delivered on Monday, but survivors fear the “glaring omissions” by prosecuting agency CBI may deny them justice. Several Indian officials of Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) will be in court on June 7 as the accused in one of the country’s longest criminal cases. But missing will be all the foreign accused, including the then chairman of the...