-PTI India's human rights record in 2011 got a thumbs down from a leading global rights group for its "failure" to protect vulnerable communities and rapped the government for custodial killings, police abuses, including torture. Human Rights Watch also criticised the Indian government for its inaction in repealing the controversial armed forces act and for remaining silent on the "gravest abuses" in countries like Syria. In its World Report 2012, Human Rights Watch...

On a wall on Station Road, among posters of Khoonkar Darinde and The Dirty Picture, Amitabh Bachchan looks out of a row of yellow-and-red posters and says, “Do boond har baar.” Here in Moradabad, the town in western Uttar Pradesh that till recently exported, besides its intricate brassware, strains of the deadly polio virus, the posters have been around for long. The writing on the wall was clear: this was...

-The ASIan Age The CBI probe into the alleged irregularities in implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Orissa, has revealed that certain work orders were allegedly issued in the name of state government officials in Kalahandi and Koraput districts of the state. According to sources the agency, which has completed its investigation into the preliminary enquiry (PE) registered to probe irregularities in implementation of the MGNREGA,...

Twitter, a hugely popular social networking site for microblogging, has said that "if required by the law" it can block tweets in a particular country. In a post titled 'Tweets Must Still Flow', Twitter, which has around 300 million users, wrote on its official blog, "Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country, while keeping it available in the rest of...

It is official: India has the world's most toxic air. In a new study by Yale and Columbia universities, India holds the very last rank among 132 nations in terms of air quality with regard to its effect on human health. India scored a minuscule 3.73 out of a possible 100 points in the analysis, lagging far behind the next worst performer, Bangladesh, which scored 13.66. In fact, the entire South ASIan...