-The Hindu Home Ministry took three days to request Army for deployment, according to information collected under Right to Information Act The riots that raged in Assam in mid-2012, claiming more than 70 lives and displacing lakhs of people, might not have escalated had the Centre reacted on time to the State’s plea for immediate deployment of the Army in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts, according to information gathered under the Right to...

-Economic and Political Weekly The vigorous public discourse following the recent brutal gang rape and mutilation of the 23-year-old in Delhi is a positive sign but hopefully the demand for quick solutions will not ignore the complexities involved in dealing with all forms of violence against women. There are also other connected issues that require urgent attention including the description of a rape as a "state worse than death", making out...

-The Times of India While Nirbhaya's brutal gang-rape horrified the nation, the events that followed the crime revealed shocking callousness on the part of both citizens and the police. In his first public statement, Nirbhaya's friend said on Friday that the two of them lay naked on the road for more than two hours with people stopping to look at them and then moving on. "My friend was grievously injured and bleeding...

-The Hindustan Times A day after Hindustan Times exposed the tout-officer nexus at the transport department’s zonal offices, nothing had changed on the ground. It was business as usual for touts and staff at the transport authority (as these zonal offices are referred to). Touts were busy striking deals with gullible applicants. Typists and agents of ‘notary public’ were seen attesting copies of documents needed for learners’ and permanent licences. Missing...

-Live Mint To maintain his constant stream of RTI petitions, Agrawal says he gets ideas from day-to-day observations, news reports, government insiders, whistle-blowers and journalists. In the summer of 1985, a cloth merchant in Chandni Chowk, the crowded market in the old quarters of Delhi, received a call in response to a letter he had written to the papers asking why his favourite weekly television serial, Rajani, could not be aired daily...