-Economic and Political Weekly   The Reliance/Network18 deal should make us wake up to the impending threat to media plurality. Few are discussing it. India has just seen one of the biggest media deals, where the country’s leading industrial and business giant has bought into the largest network of news and current affairs TV channels. Yet, the fact that this could mark the beginning of a trend leading to private media being controlled...

What was our immediate response to further decline in the child sex ratio in India? Within days of the provisional 2011 Census results (March-April 2011), the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reconstituted the Central Supervisory Board for the Pre-conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex selection) Act 1994 , which had not met for 3 years, and on November 30, 2011 the Ministry of Women and Child Development...

-The Financial Express   The International Labour Organization has released a pessimistic report for the global jobs market in 2012 saying urgent attention is needed to create 600 million new jobs in the next 10 years. "Despite strenuous government efforts, the jobs crisis continues unabated, with one in three workers worldwide, or an estimated 1.1 billion people, either unemployed or living in poverty," said ILO director-general, Juan Somavia, in the Global Employment Trends...

Custodial deaths on the rise, says report Deaths in Police Custody The 10 Worst States Maharashtra - 250 Uttar Pradesh - 174 Gujarat - 134 Andhra Pradesh - 109 West Bengal - 98 Tamil Nadu - 95 Assam - 84 Karnataka - 67 Punjab - 57 Madhya Pradesh - 55 Haryana - 45 *** Tamirul Haq had just stepped out to buy some cigarettes, and probably told his family he’d be back soon. But the 42-year-old from Bengal’s North Dinajpur district never returned home. On...

The human resource development ministry today agreed to some key demands of the Bar Council of India, defusing the war over regulating legal education, though it didn’t concede the turf entirely. “The ministry has agreed to accept the BCI’s demand that it should regulate all aspects of the profession of law, including its foundation through legal education,” council chairman Ashok Parija told The Telegraph after a meeting with HRD minister Kapil...