-The Economic Times A parliamentary standing committee has taken a grim view of constant pruning of budget of agriculture ministry. It has asked the Centre to adopt a fresh outlook towards allocation of finances to the sector as it sustains economically weak farming community.  The parliamentary panel examining the demands for Grants of agriculture ministry found that in the Eleventh Plan there was a wide difference between proposed budget estimate (BE) of...

Recent debates on Internet censorship in India have focused to the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don’t apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth. It has been said that the internet can be used to incite...

-The Hindu Made an accused by Jaipur Police in a counter case to hers against the police   The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted interim bail a paraplegic and alleged victim of custodial sexual torture from Jaipur. The girl had been made an accused by the Jaipur Police (District East) in a counter case to hers against the police. Justice C. S. Thakur and Justice Gyan Sudha Mishra of the Supreme Court, who heard...

-Reuters Rome: Governments are failing to fund projects to improve access to toilets and other sanitation services in poor countries because the subject remains "taboo", a director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said on Monday. "Who wants to talk about shit?" asked Frank Rijsberman, Director of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at the $ 34 billion charitable foundation, during an interview with Reuters on Monday. "It's the last big taboo and as...

Following protests from Darul Uloom, Deoband, and certain Islamic organisations, a research scholar at Meerut’s Chaudhary Charan Singh University has requested the UGC to change the subject of her post-doctoral fellowship for research on ‘Use of Magic Realism in the major novels of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth’. Prabha Parmar has communicated her decision in a letter to the University Grants Commission (UGC), which had awarded her the five-year...