Food minister K.V. Thomas is examining the possibility of bringing in a law to contain the wastage of food at weddings and other social gatherings. Will such a law be feasible, wonders Hemchhaya De The gala British royal wedding might have gripped the world, but are big, fat Indian weddings justified? It’s a poser that the Indian food minister, some senior Congress leaders and former bureaucrats are trying to deal with...

“It needs to be independent …. So it can't be pressured by the Prime Minister” With the Prime Minister's office intervening in several high-profile environment cases — most recently the Maheshwar dam issue — Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan has called for an independent environment regulator to be set up on the lines of the Lokpal. “It needs to be independent and autonomous of the government, so that it can't be pressured...

The Supreme Court today pulled up a lower court judge for interfering with an order it had passed and warned of weeding out corrupt judges in a sweeping lash that didn’t spare even lawyers. The court said a section of the subordinate judiciary was passing orders on “extraneous” grounds and should be thrown out for bringing a bad name to the whole institution. The withering rap comes at a time allegations of...

The Supreme Court turned down on Wednesday a government demand to re-open the case into the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy and hand harsher sentences to seven men convicted of negligence. The court dismissed CBI's curative petition seeking restoration of stringent charges against Bhopal tragedy accused saying it was filed 14 years after the 1996 judgment, which was only a prima facie view of evidence that had come on record till that...

The polluting cement plant will harm the ecosystem: expert body ‘It is considered a valuable common property resource by the locals' In a victory for the farmers of Gujarat's Bhavnagar district, the Environment Ministry has decided that the site of Nirma Industries' proposed cement plant there is a wetland and an environmentally sensitive area. The plant will have to be relocated, the Ministry told the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The Ministry accepted the...