With its politically crucial food security agenda facing time-consuming scrutiny by a parliamentary panel, the government is considering the option of rolling out key elements of the programme through an executive decision that can be later subsumed by an act of Parliament. Concerned the bill that negotiated divides within the government and involved discussions with the Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council might be delayed till later this year, the Centre could...

-The United Nations   With no registered polio cases over the past year, India is on course to becoming free of the disease, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) reported today. If all pending samples for the virus test negative, India – once regarded as the world’s epicentre for polio – will become free of the disease for the first time in its history, reducing the number of polio-endemic countries to three:...

In June 1979, an innovation in the field of law and politics came about in the form of Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. The idea behind it is identifying and publicising cases of violations of fundamental rights. For the first time a session of the tribunal was held in India in November 2011. In an interview to Jyotika Sood, the secretary general of the tribunal, Gianni Tognoni, tells how it works What is...

US-based companies Google Inc., Facebook Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others were issued summons by a Delhi court on Friday in connection with criminal charges for “objectionable” material hosted online.   Simultaneously, the Union government sanctioned the prosecution of the companies on its behalf.   Metropolitan magistrate Sudesh Kumar directed representatives of the global companies to be present in his court on 13 March. The summons will be served at their registered...

Without equality, democracy and social justice, which are three interrelated factors, secularism cannot exist as a positive value in society. I HAVE known Prof. Romila Thapar for about 45 years, most of it as a colleague at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila, as she is called by almost everybody – from her eight-year-old grandnephew to all of us present here – had helped to...