The much-awaited Bill on sexual harassment at workplaces gets the Cabinet nod for presentation in Parliament. ON November 4, the Union Cabinet gave the go-ahead for the enactment of a law on protection of women from sexual harassment at the workplace. Titled Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill, 2010, the draft law is basically a new avatar of the ones prepared in 2004. This development has been...

The Radia tapes reveal the networks and routers, the source codes and malware that bind the corporate and political establishments in India. As squeamish schoolchildren know only too well, dissection is a messy business. Some instinctively turn away, others become nauseous or scared. Not everyone can stomach first hand the inner workings of an organic system. Ten days ago, a scalpel — in the form of a set of 104 intercepted...

The ethics of journalists involving themselves with corporate lobbyists, questions relating to the authenticity of the Radia tapes, the motives behind the release of the phone recordings, the initial silence of the mainstream media, concerns of privacy, and the role of social and online media were among the issues that came to the fore during a colloquium, ‘Radia Media,' organised by the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) here on Wednesday. While...

Media-corporate links are structural. But journalists, certainly entrenched ones, can choose whether they wish to be stenographers or not. It was gratifying to have the head of India's most reputed business house confirm the existence of crony capitalism in the country. True, others have believed this for 20 years but it carries more weight when Ratan Tata says so. As he put it in a television interview with admirable candour: “Yes,...

Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar today said the government should take note of Ratan Tata’s statement that India risked turning into a “banana republic” and cautioned against the excessive use of the CBI. Pawar’s statement came in the middle of a CBI crackdown on an alleged bribes-for-loans scandal involving several top financial officials and real estate players in Maharashtra. Another real estate project, which was once associated with Pawar’s relatives, has been...