The Congress-led government in Assam is going into an overdrive before the polls to reach out to all sections of the population. Chief minister Tarun Gogoi today announced his government’s decision to increase the quota of rice from 10kg to 20kg rice per family at the rate of Rs 6 per kg under the Chief Minister’s Anna Suraksha Yojana that was launched late last year. The scheme, being funded from the state’s...

Some of India's most prominent artists including Sharmila Tagore, Naseeruddin Shah, Aparna Sen, Mahesh Bhatt, Rahul Bose and others have written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh protesting against the imprisonment of Human Rights activist Binayak Sen. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on sedition charges by the Additional District and Sessions Court at Raipur last month. 61-year-old Sen, a paediatrician by profession, was arrested in May 2007 in Bilaspur on...

Confusion prevails here over implementing the Right to Education (RTE) Act and activists are accusing private school managements of back-pedalling on flimsy grounds for fear of losing their elitist tags. This has delayed the admission process in various city schools. The Chandigarh administration, the private schools association, social activists and parents are still debating the provisions of the RTE Act. There has been no consensus so far. The RTE Act makes it...

The historian Ramachandra Guha has famously described India as a fifty-fifty democracy. But even admirers of India as a functioning democracy will perhaps be forced to admit that certain events in 2010 forced the needle to move beyond fifty against democracy. Threats to democracy and democratic rights have never been as evident, and as powerful, since the dark days of the Emergency in 1975-76 as they were in the course...

I am very upset about the court decision in Chhattisgarh about Binayak Sen. It is a huge perversion of our system of justice, and particularly of the laws concerning sedition. It’s not at all clear, to start with, that the thing he has been exactly accused of — of passing letters — has been really proved beyond doubt. Secondly, even if this were correct, that doesn’t amount to sedition. He hasn’t...