-PTI   The Lokpal Bill, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha last week, has been referred to a Parliamentary Standing Committee for in-depth scrutiny. The bill has been sent by Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari to the Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances and Law and Justice which has been given three months to submit its report, a Parliament source said. Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi, who is a senior advocate, was only recently...

-The Times of India   KENDRAPADA: Right to Information campaigner and Magsaysay award winner Aruna Roy has asked the state government to stop construction and tree felling works for the proposed steel plant of Posco in the seaside gram panchayats of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Gadakujang in Jagatsinghpur district and have a public debate on the issue. Roy visited the villages in the proposed steel plant site on Sunday in support of the...

The Centre today took the extraordinary step of advising media to be “responsible” and not to “demonise” a different point of view, reflecting an assessment that the prevailing sense of drift was severely affecting legislative and administrative processes. Three senior cabinet ministers — Salman Khurshid (law), Kapil Sibal (telecom) and Ambika Soni (information and broadcasting) — appealed to the media to put things in perspective instead of sensationalising every issue without...

After a four-decade battle, Indian lawmakers took the first formal step toward creating an independent anticorruption agency on Thursday, introducing a bill in Parliament that would appoint a powerful ombudsman, or Lokpal, to investigate wrongdoing by government officials. But the draft of the law, which exempts the Prime Minister, members of Parliament and many other officials from the Lokpal’s jurisdiction, was roundly rejected by many of the people who had...

  There are times when fathers and sons say the same things. In 2008, days after terrorists from Pakistan massacred scores of people in Mumbai, a group of affluent young couples met for dinner. They work in large corporations, hold university degrees from the United States and England, subscribe to The Economist and even read it. But it was inevitable that when the men started talking about how the Indian government was too...