When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young bride years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives. "My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village...

-The Hindu   Cases of crime under various categories in the country increased by about 5 per cent last year as compared to 2009, according to a publication of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). Besides, road accidents alone claimed 1.33 lakh lives last year, an increase of 5.5 per cent over 2009 that saw 1.26 lakh deaths. According to “Crime in India 2010,” a total of 22,24,831 crimes were reported under the...

The National Mission to improve the delivery of justice is at work. In October 2009, on the basis of a Vision Document adopted at a judicial conference in New Delhi, the Government of India approved in principle a National Mission to reduce pendency and delays in the judicial system and enhance accountability through structural changes, higher performance standards and capacity-building. Many past attempts to achieve the goals did not yield results...

Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the Supreme Court commissioners on the right to food, is up in arms against the National Food Security Bill. “Despite multiple meetings and many suggestions put forward, what we have is a mockery of a bill. The government has made a dog’s breakfast out of the right to food bill,” he exclaims. Patnaik’s is not a one-off complaint. Some argue that the country’s law-making process is...

-The Telegraph   The Union health ministry today warned that bottle gourd juice should not be consumed if it comes from bitter-tasting pulp in an advisory on a practice promoted by yoga and Ayurveda evangelist Baba Ramdev among others. “Bitter-tasting bottle gourd juice should not be consumed at all,” the ministry said, urging that a small piece of the pulp of bottle gourd, lauki in Hindi, should be tasted before the extraction of...