-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has got a reluctant railways on board for its ambitious bill seeking a blanket ban on manual scavenging. The Prohibition of Empowerment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, which was cleared last week by the cabinet, had been pending for over a year because the railways did not want to be part of it. The largest public carrier had...

-The Hindu Civil liberties activists have criticised the media for being an IB mouthpiece in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case, while others question the role of ‘activist journalists' The battle over the Gujarat encounter killings of 2004 is being fought at multiple levels. An ideological and political conflict has erupted over the ways to fight "terror." The Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) are engaged in an unprecedented inter-agency...

-The Hindu There has been no public debate on the level of watch citizens can be put through, and on what the red lines should be while using intrusive mechanisms The tussle between government agencies' need for a better, faster and real-time interception, surveillance and monitoring mechanism through the Central Monitoring System (CMS), on the one hand, and demands by privacy, civil rights and free speech activists, for ensuring higher privacy for...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today observed that even if there was a grain of truth in the charges that Ranbaxy was supplying adulterated drugs, it was a "very, very serious matter" but refrained from issuing any orders till it received "prima facie material". The court said that drug-testing standards in the US were different from those in India, and what was happening in America might not necessarily be happening...

-The Hindu   Ranbaxy's fraudulent practices may have jeopardised millions of lives in India, Africa and the U.S. Exactly two weeks ago, the pharmaceuticals industry was rocked by revelations that one of the world's largest generic drug manufacturers, Ranbaxy Laboratories, pleaded guilty to seven federal criminal charges stemming from its fraudulent production practices dating back to 2008, and agreed to pay U.S. regulators $500 million in fines. Much has since been said about Ranbaxy's...