-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...

-The Economic Times Decks have been cleared for reintroduction of the Companies Bill, 2011, in the monsoon session. If the bill is passed after endorsing all the suggestions made by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, corporate social responsibility (CSR) would, for the first time in the world, become mandatory.  The report recommends that companies with net worth above Rs 500 crore, or an annual turnover of over Rs 1,000 crore, earmark...

-The Economic Times The Union Cabinet is expected to take up for approval a bill that deals with manual scavenging and rehabilitation of scavengers.  For nearly two years now, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has been advocating for a new law to deal with the indignities of manual scavenging and for their rehabilitation. Gandhi had, in November 2010, written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking the government to take steps to...

1. Whether we see the elimination of cartoons from textbooks as involving issues of freedom of expression would depend on how we view the status of images in the text. Surely different genres of texts connote different forms of creativity. Contrary to what Bilgrami thinks, images in most of these NCERT textbooks are not merely ‘illustrations' but are constitutive of the text, shaping the meaning of what is being said....

The thrust of Prabhat Patnaik's argument (“Parliament's say extends to the classroom,” The Hindu , May 22, 2012) is clear. It is to declare illegitimate the arguments against government action on the recent textbook controversy. What is this hullabaloo about, Patnaik seems to be saying: what is under threat is not the status of critical pedagogy in the textbooks but the jurisdiction of the Parliament. The larger argument within Patnaik's polemic...