-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 Hindustan Times Culture and tradition have always been cited as the bedrocks on which our superior family values are founded. But like so many elevating qualities that we feel we are endowed with, this too is largely a myth. A recent survey by Child Rights and You found that one-third of Delhi feels that children should work as hard as adults and that they should be paid less. The invisibility...

-The Times of India   Children, many between five and 10 years, were forced into oral sex and performing yoga in the nude at the Rohtak shelter home raided by a National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) team early May. An inmate was found to be HIV positive.  Such revelations are part of a report submitted on Wednesday by two members — advocate Anil Malhotra and Sudeepti Sharma — of a...

Why is the world's biggest democracy cracking down on Facebook and Google? "65 years since your independence," a new battle for freedom is under way in India -- according to a YouTube video uploaded by an Indian member of Anonymous, the global "hacktivist" movement. With popular websites like Vimeo.com blocked across India by court order, the video calls for action: "Fight for your rights. Fight for India." Over the past several...

-The Hindu “Iwill open my mouth,” Major Avtar Singh had told the journalist, Hartosh Singh Bal, last year. “I will not keep quiet.'' This weekend, Singh, facing extradition proceedings for his alleged role in the brutal 1996 murder of Kashmiri human rights activist and lawyer Jalil Andrabi, shot himself, his wife, and their two young children, at their home in Selma, California. In weeks to come, theories about what led Singh...