It needs pensive reflection to understand how an organisation whose name is perhaps the most widely recognised public sector brand across the length and breadth of India could become the target of so much instant anger and contempt in the highest legislative forum of the republic. Krishna Kumar (anhsirk.kumar@gmail.com) teaches education at Delhi University. The cyclone that hit Parliament on 11 and 14 May over the so-called cartoon controversy indicates, among other...

-The Times of India Online hacker group Anonymous targeted websites of the Supreme Court of India and the All India Congress Committee on Thursday to protest Internet censorship. Anonymous launched Operation India with a tweet that said, "Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck." A YouTube video uploaded on May 15 by user Sen0nymous, titled 'Operation India Engaged', issued a call to...

The IT (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, drafted to protect intermediaries, now appear to be a tool that can be used to harass them. EIGHT years ago, the chief executive officer of an auction portal was put behind bars because a user put an obscene MMS clip up for sale on the site. This sparked a demand from intermediaries, the entities that provide services enabling the delivery of online content to end-users,...

It has been a slow but steady move to make scholarship freely available Most of us spend a few hundred rupees a year on the magazines we buy for leisure reading or for keeping abreast of current affairs. But if you are a scientist, you may be shelling out a few thousand rupees for the journal your professional society publishes for its members. Of course, if you are a serious researcher,...

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...