India earned another dubious distinction in child mortality with the highest number of deaths of children under-five-years of age, according to a UNICEF report released in September 2012. India's toll is higher than the deaths in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan put together. Globally, almost 19,000 children under five years of age die every day across the world a quarter of which is in India alone. India accounted for...
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A short history of Indian freedom of speech-Kian Ganz
Between 2009 and February 2011, at least 14 people were charged with sedition in India London: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013. In late August the government’s department of telecommunications, citing the “communal tensions” around Assam, blocked more than 300 individual web addresses, including the Twitter profile pages of some journalists. It also ordered a limit...
More »Is invoking the sedition law mere state folly or a sign that space for dissent is shrinking?-Sukumar Muralidharan
-The Economic Times "Sedition" is a legal construct from less enlightened times, when the sovereign power claimed a divine sanction and subjects were expected to live in awe and fear. So what is republican India doing, in its seventh decade, in bringing a charge of sedition against a self-publishing cartoonist with a propensity for scatology and lurid imagery? A convulsive attack of folly that the agencies of the Indian state have...
More »Aseem Trivedi's arrest shows how colonial-era sedition laws lend themselves to abuse
-The Times of India Normally, a cartoon makes us smile. But that's changing now, as the arrest of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi on charges of sedition has provoked angry criticism across society. The arrest contravenes the Indian citizen's right to freedom of speech and expression. Importantly, this is a right the Constitution, constructed by the founders of an independent Indian republic, guarantees. Sedition, on the other hand, is a repressive colonial law,...
More »The Parthasarathi Shome Committee Report-Prabhat Patnaik
-Macroscan.com In his speech introducing the 2012-13 budget, the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee had declared his intention to introduce a General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) to counter ''aggressive tax avoidance schemes''. What GAAR means is that even if a transaction appears to be legally valid, if it is entered into for the sole purpose of tax avoidance, then the Indian tax authorities can deny tax benefit to the concerned entity. GAAR...
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