–PTI The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the exercise undertaken by it for framing guidelines for reporting court proceedings was aimed at making the press know its “Lakshman rekha” and not intended for taking punitive action against scribes. “Whatever efforts we are making, please don't interpret it as being intended for punishing or taking punitive action. We only want the press to know the ‘Lakshman rekha' for them. “We want them to know...

The exploitation of migrant construction workers has grown alongside the expansion of the industry. It's time the government got serious about upholding the law. A recent report in The Hindu on the violation of labour laws at a massive construction site belonging to the Army Welfare Housing Organisation in Bangalore raises yet again the repeated neglect of regulations relating to the employment and welfare of workers by construction companies in India. For...

Recent debates on Internet censorship in India have focused to the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don’t apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth. It has been said that the internet can be used to incite...

I have not read the Private Member's Bill on media regulation that Meenakshi Natarajan was scheduled to move in Parliament last week so I am not in a position to comment upon it, but I am certainly of the opinion that the media (both print and electronic) needs to be regulated. Since my ideas on this issue have generated some controversy they need to be clarified. I want regulation of the...

-Express News Service Three killers of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi will join families of several convicts on death row, including Devendra Pal Singh Bhullar, before the Supreme Court for commutation of their death penalty to life imprisonment owing to inordinate delay in mercy process.   Invoking its Constitutional powers to transfer any case which raises “substantial questions of general importance”, a Supreme Court Bench led by Justice G S Singhvi on Tuesday...