-Kafila.org In a speech delivered at the Reuters memorial lecture in November 2012 at Oxford University discussing the Indian news industry, Prannoy Roy candidly said that ”Indian news is currently in a race to the bottom”. He further added that upon comparing the average TV viewership in India (1 hour) to that in the US (5 hours), one is led to the utterly dismal conclusion that this race is far from...

-Al Jazeera Widening wealth gap in Beijing has stoked concerns over its impact on political and social stability. The Chinese government has issued a pledge to narrow the widening income gap between rich and poor, which includes raising its minimum wage and requiring state companies to turn over more profits to pay for social programmes. The pledge on Tuesday promised more spending on health, education and job training but gave few details and...

-IPS News Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution’s decade-long forest policy, expressing their “strong disagreement” with some assertions in the report. The assessment, written by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), the World Bank Group’s auditor, warns that expectations for poverty reduction as envisioned in the bank’s 2002 Forest Strategy “have not yet been met”. The report is particularly critical...

-Outlook Caste has nothing to do with graft. Even so, Nandy must be heard. Forging a link, however tenuous, between caste and corruption is akin to saying  that the average Indian male  has sex on his mind, caste and communalism in his heart and indigestion in his tummy. That was an irreverent response to the sweeping statement made by the “ageing enfant terrible” of Indian sociology, Ashis Nandy, during a discussion...

-DNA 1. The equality of women, being integral to the Constitution, its denial is a sacrilege and a constitutional violation. Sustained constitutional violations mean that governance is not in accordance with the Constitution. A fortiori, all limbs of the State - the executive, the legislature as well as the judiciary -must respect women’s rights and must treat them in a non-discriminatory manner. 2. As a primary recommendation, all marriages in India (irrespective...