-The Times of India NEW DELHI: BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi's claim that UPA had forgotten Sardar Patel till this year is far off the mark. The government's publicity arm, directorate of advertising and visual publicity (DAVP), has spent Rs 8.5 crore in advertisements to commemorate Sardar Patel's birth anniversary over the last four years. Ironically, the shoe may be on the other foot. In its tenure - between 1999 and...

-The Hindu The Union Ministry of Labour has done well to raise the salary cap for availing Employees' State Insurance (ESI) to Rs.25,000. While the move is expected to expand coverage to an additional five million workers and their dependents, this is still small comfort in a country where barely three per cent of the workforce enjoys any social protection. The evolution of ESI has been characterised by an accent...

-Kafila.org This fact-finding exercise was coordinated by the CENTRE FOR POLICY ANALYSIS. Team members were the human rights activist and former civil servant Harsh Mander; former Director-General of the Border Security Force, E N Rammohan; Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy of Jawaharlal Nehru University; National Integration Council member John Dayal; senior journalist Sukumar Muralidharan and CPA Director and senior editor Seema Mustafa. Introduction and Overview The first impression of the Muzaffarnagar countryside, now green...

-Newslaundry.com There's always outrage at the government ad spend on the death and birth centenaries of our erstwhile politicians. On Rajiv Gandhi's death centenary in 2013, we carried a report with incorrect figures. Following which, we filed a Right To Information (RTI) application to ask for the amount of advertising spend by the government on Rajiv Gandhi's death centenary ads in the Delhi editions of various English Newspapers. When we contacted...

-The Hindu Allahabad: Even as the Uttar Pradesh government blamed the circulation of a fake video on social media for aggravating communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, inflamattory and communally inciting material continued to be spread widely on social networking sites and applications. Newspapers reports, morphed with inflammatory headlines, were widely circulated through various groups on Twitter, Facebook and other mediums of social media on Monday. Two widely circulated posts were picture clippings from...