If home minister P Chidambaram’s recent letter to West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indication, it has taken the Union home ministry seven years to realise that arming civilians to fight Naxalites is a bad idea. How much longer will it take for them to realise that the current paramilitary-based approach in Chhattisgarh is similarly bound to fail? From 2003 onwards, the home ministry has followed a policy of...
More »SEARCH RESULT
2010: Action-packed year for Environment Ministry
The Environment and Forests Ministry was in news throughout 2010 -- be it for Vedanta Resources, Posco and Lavasa -- or for Jairam Ramesh's aggressive green activism. While the ministry rejected the green signal to Vedanta for its $1.7 billion project to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa noting that the company violated the environment and forests rules, it put the $12 billion project by South Korean steelmaker Posco...
More »‘Justice Balakrishnan should resign, face probe' by J Venkatesan
The former Member of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Sudarshan Agarwal, has appealed to NHRC Chairman K.G. Balakrishnan to resign and face an enquiry. Mr. Agarwal, who is also a former Governor of Uttarakhand and Sikkim, in a letter written to Justice Balakrishnan on December 29, 2010, said: “It is with deep pain and anguish — nay, with a deep sense of shock — that I read in the national...
More »Proceedings against Ashish Nandy stayed
The Supreme Court on Tuesday stayed the proceedings in a criminal case registered against political analyst Ashish Nandy for an article published in a national newspaper on the 2002 Gujarat communal riots. A Bench of Justices Altamas Kabir and Cyric Joseph stayed the proceedings on an appeal filed by Mr. Nandy against a Delhi High Court order dated September 1, 2010, declining to quash the case registered against him under Sections...
More »Indian consumers fight weak laws, slow courts by Rama Lakshmi
In a packed special court that hears consumer complaints, Hansraj Sharma nervously shuffled through a pile of papers that told the story of his decade-long battle against a car dealer and a bank. District and state-level consumer courts twice sided with Sharma, awarding him $800 for a shady loan scheme. But the defendants repeatedly appealed. Now, after 58 court appearances, his case still drags on. "They keep asking for adjournment on some...
More »