-Down to Earth For RTI activists of Bihar the cost of exposing corruption is life Twenty-year-old Rahul Kumar, a right to information (RTI) activist, knew the land mafia was behind his parents' murder. His mother and father were involved in a land dispute in Muzaffarpur's Sirisia Jagdish village. Barely a week after filing an RTI application to seek information about the murderers, Kumar was kidnapped. A day later, on March 10, 2012,...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: With 9,787 regular and 4,447 contract drivers on its payroll, Delhi Transport Corporation has one of the largest resource pools in the city. Unfortunately, these drivers are calling attention to the corporation for all the wrong reasons. Since 2011, the number of accidents involving DTC buses has steadily gone up with a corresponding increase in fatalities. Complaints of rash driving have been pouring in, prompting frequent...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Supreme Court judgment on the Novartis-Glivec case is remarkable because it has gone beyond the specific technical and legal issues surrounding patents and has put the matter in a much larger political and economic perspective. The deeper implication of the judgment is that it is not only justified to deny patents when incremental innovation is trivial as in the Glivec case. The judgment has linked the...

-The Hindu Nellore: Revenue officials headed by Gudur Sub-Collector J. Niwas conducted raids on brick kilns in Nayudupeta area and released about 53 Odisha bonded labourers from the clutches of the brick kiln operators. The raids were conducted following complaints filed by the International Justice Mission (IJM). Among the rescued labourers were 21 children and all of them were escorted back to their native villages in Odisha with the help of officials. In...