Human rights groups combating sexual assault, women's groups and groups working on child rights have come together to reflect on the extent to which the proposed Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2010 addresses concerns on the ground.  The Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2010, being proposed to bring about changes in the criminal laws with respect to protections against sexual assault, has been a subject of discussion and popular misinterpretation in the...

Three men were on Saturday sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of murdering National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) engineer Satyendra Dubey, the young whistle-blower who had exposed corruption in a national highway project in Bihar, seven years ago. Mantu Kumar, Udai Kumar and Pinku Ravidas were handed the life sentence by a special CBI court judge Raghvendra Singh, who held them guilty of the murder of the 31-year-old IIT-Kanpur...

I have been an advisor to The Energy and Resources Institute or Teri, a distinguished visiting fellow there since 1996, except when I was the chairman of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, the director-general of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, the chairman of the Institute for Social and Economic Change and on boards of management and economic research institutions. This disclaimer is intended to forestall motives being ascribed...

Rattled by the spate of honour killings in northern states, the UPA government is preparing a legislative route to amend Indian Penal Code (IPC) and provide a deterrent punishment against khap panchayats, which order death penalty to young couples who marry defying caste barrier. "We are seriously considering amending Indian Penal Code to make honour killing a separate and distinct offence and provide deterrent punishment," a top home ministry source...

R.K. Pachauri says he was not personally responsible for the mistake  Insists it was an “isolated” mistake, “totally out of character” with IPCC’s rigorous standards “I don’t do many populist things, that’s why I’m so unpopular with a certain section of society” LONDON: Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on Wednesday admitted that its credibility was damaged by the controversy over its 2007 report, which falsely...