-The Telegraph Teachers who don’t believe in sparing the rod, beware. If an amendment to an existing act on juvenile justice is passed, corporal punishment will for the first time become a standalone provision in the law under which teachers found guilty could be jailed for up to seven years, depending on the nature of injury. As of now there is no definition of corporal punishment except for a provision under the Right...

-Live Mint To maintain his constant stream of RTI petitions, Agrawal says he gets ideas from day-to-day observations, news reports, government insiders, whistle-blowers and journalists. In the summer of 1985, a cloth merchant in Chandni Chowk, the crowded market in the old quarters of Delhi, received a call in response to a letter he had written to the papers asking why his favourite weekly television serial, Rajani, could not be aired daily...

The government has put its foot down against corporal punishment and ragging and is proposing changes in the law that would send offenders to up to seven years in jail. To protect children in educational institutions, the government has for the first time defined corporal punishment and ragging in the proposed changes to the Juvenile Justice Act, which is being renamed as the Child Justice (Care, Protection and Rehabilitation of...

Panel meets Mamata, seeks an action taken report within three months The National Commission for Women (NCW) has expressed deep concern over the reported case of sexual assault on a physically challenged minor girl allegedly by a medical professional at the Bankura Medical Hospital in West Bengal. “The case is extremely distressing considering that the victim is a person of special needs and she was under the care of a doctor, who...

The National Food Security Bill, 2011, designed to make access to food a legal right, is the last chance to convert Gandhiji's vision of a hunger-free India into reality. What Mahatma Gandhi said of the role of food in a human being's life in a 1946 speech at Noakhali, now in Bangladesh, remains the most powerful expression of the importance of making access to food a basic human right. Gandhiji also...