The outcome of Stockholm Convention to ban endosulfan capping a long-drawn campaign against the pesticide on health grounds may have brought cheers to the opponents but the domestic industry is crying foul suspecting an European link aiming to capture the Indian market. India and a few other developing countries extracted several exemptions, including a phase out period of 11 years to ban production and use of the toxic pesticide at the...

Do you know that the highest number of corruption cases are registered in Maharashtra (4566) and the lowest in West Bengal (only 9) between 2000 and 2009? Do you also want to know how much property has been recovered from the corrupt in different states of India in the past ten years? But how does one systematically track corruption? How to get details of the number of cases going on...

The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council will send the Working Group's Draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 to the Union Home and Law Ministries within a week to solicit their comments, especially on its “legal dimensions,” NAC sources told The Hindu on Thursday. Once the Centre responds to the draft, the Working Group will revise the Bill and bring it back to the...

Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan said here on Friday that people's movements in Kerala and other States had forced the Centre to change its stand at the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. Reports and photographs taken to the Convention from Kerala had also helped in arriving at the decision. “It was not just a campaign against the Centre but also one to create awareness of the dangers of the pesticide,” the...

The activism of civil society against corruption has caught the imagination of many Indians. Arguments put forward by representatives of the civil society organisations (CSOs) can be summarised as follows: 'All - at least most - politicians, ministers, bureaucrats are corrupt. Voters are incapable of deciding what is good for them. The police, Central Bureau of Investigation and the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, and all other agencies of the State...