-The Hindu Aggrieved women have received rations only thrice in the past five years Two semi-literate housewives, Beena and Mitra Devi, hesitantly but wilfully trail us, ration card in hand, on a hot Saturday afternoon. We are walking towards Fair Price Shop No. 7980 in Harsh Vihar near Delhi’s border with Ghaziabad. Though fearful of the ration shop owner and his toughs, these two women realise it is now or never. They...

-The Times of India Chief Justice of India (CJI) S H Kapadia on Saturday joined the debate on the CAG's estimate of "windfall gains" for private players in the coal block allocation scam, suggesting such assessments may not be accurate. "People should be educated on economics as well to understand that these irregularities should be understood from the point of loss, which was a matter of fact, and not from profit angle,...

-The Hindu In an atmosphere of mistrust of the government, only an independent safety regulatory mechanism can counter the scaremongering against civilian nuclear power I work at an institution funded by the Department of Atomic Energy (which, however, does no nuclear research: the DAE funds a wide variety of institutions and areas in science). About a year ago, I had an e-mail from a journalist who wondered why scientists (including colleagues at...

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...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Kanpur-based cartoonist Aseem Trivedi (25), who surrendered to the BKC police on Saturday, was remanded in seven days' police custody by the Bandra holiday court on Sunday. Charged with sedition for insulting national symbols through his cartoons, he refused to engage a lawyer in protest. The cartoons in question are on the theme Cartoons Against Corruption and one of them depicts the national emblem as comprising...