Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...

The Supreme Court has converted a high-powered committee of the Government of India, on the issue of black money, into an SIT under its own direction. This is an expression of no-confidence in the executive. The government’s intention in tackling either the problem of black economy or bringing back the black savings stashed abroad is suspect. According to reports, the money stashed abroad by the corrupt businessmen, politicians and others...

-The Hindu   Anti-graft legislation has to be backed by a concerted people's movement to effectively check the escalation of Corruption in a neo-liberal regime, economist Prabhat Patnaik said on Friday. Delivering the W.R. Varadarajan Memorial lecture on “Neo-liberalism and Corruption” organised by the Indian School of Social Sciences, Mr. Patnaik said the move to a neo-liberal regime, which, it was believed, would get rid of Corruption, had actually expanded the scope...

DESPITE WHAT our reel-life heroes have shown us, perhaps it’s only possible to fight one villain at a time. Still, in his last few days on the job, Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde tried to battle two evils, with two reports that presented damning evidence of Corruption in the BJP government. The first report, on illegal mining, had enough firepower to systematically dig holes in the state government. The second report,...

The government's decision to exclude the prime minister from the ambit of the lokpal contradicts the position taken by previous governments on this issue between 1989 and 2001, in their failed attempts to get the bill passed in Parliament. A look at the previous bills shows though the lokpal bill was introduced for the first time in Parliament in 1968, it was only in 1989, during the fifth unsuccessful attempt,...