I have not read the Private Member's Bill on media regulation that Meenakshi Natarajan was scheduled to move in Parliament last week so I am not in a position to comment upon it, but I am certainly of the opinion that the media (both print and electronic) needs to be regulated. Since my ideas on this issue have generated some controversy they need to be clarified. I want regulation of the...

-The Hindustan Times The National Advisory Council (NAC) has cast serious doubts on the government's cash-incentive scheme to check female foeticide and correct India's skewed sex ratio, saying the money given out under the plan is indirectly promoting dowry. The Centre and 13 states have been offering cash incentives to poor families with the twin aim of saving the girl child and supporting her after she turns 18. The scheme was introduced...

The robust 9 per cent –plus growth in South Asia till 2010, driven largely by India, where it came down to around 7 per cent in 2011-12, had one major qualifier: it was mostly associated with a rapid rise in labour productivity rather than an expansion in employment, according to the latest report Global Employment Trends from International Labour Office. Up until the end of the millennium, that is just a...

It's a shocking revelation in this day and age. Not just Indian men, but even adolescents - in the 15-19 age group - feel that wife beating is justified. Unicef's " Global Report Card on Adolescents 2012", says that 57% of adolescent boys in India think a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife. Over half of the Indian adolescent girls, or around 53% think that a husband is justified...

Why kill over a people’s dietary preference for beef? “The university and all teaching systems that appear simply to disseminate knowledge are made to maintain a certain social class in power, and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.... The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack...