-The Hindu If only laws could eliminate all that they prohibit, India would have been free of the scourge of manual scavenging decades ago. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Bill, which is to be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament, is another attempt to prevent employment of people in the cleaning, handling or carrying of human excreta. Despite the renewed stress on rehabilitation in the...

The Supreme Court has taken steps to lay down a code for media reporting. This attempt at prior restraint on the media is a dangerous move with precedent from authoritarian polities. In a context where the judiciary has been lax in defending the media from attacks which seek to curb its freedom, such unilateral moves will not remedy bad reporting but rather make conditions worse for the media to play...

Only 18 per cent cases registered under dowry death charges end up in conviction, statistics available with the Delhi Police reveal. According to the Delhi Police figures, a dowry death is reported in the city every third day. Of the 681 people arrested under the sections of dowry death in Delhi, only 207 were convicted of the charges and sent to jail. Around four years ago, the Delhi Police had issued a...

-The Hindustan Times Killing of women for dowry is no longer a rural phenomenon. The menace is fast catching up with the metropolitan elite - those who are considered educated, civil and well to do. Also, it is no more confined to the arranged marriages but afflicting matrimonial bonds that eMerge out of years of courtship and love. The fact that 12 women are either killed or forced to die for dowry each...

Following protests from Darul Uloom, Deoband, and certain Islamic organisations, a research scholar at Meerut’s Chaudhary Charan Singh University has requested the UGC to change the subject of her post-doctoral fellowship for research on ‘Use of Magic Realism in the major novels of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth’. Prabha Parmar has communicated her decision in a letter to the University Grants Commission (UGC), which had awarded her the five-year...