"When I asked my son if he was tortured, he said, 'They were hardly going to treat me with love...They used to make us memorize the police version of the case. We were not allowed to sleep until we could recite that version.' " These words by Nisar Ahmed are an excerpt from the106-page report released yesterday, by Human Right Watch titled, "The 'Anti-Nationals': Arbitrary Detention and Torture of Terrorism...

Advocates carrot and stick formula to ensure compliance Norms must be enforced, which is often difficult, says Prime Minister “Capacity building, key to effective village level planning” In the midst of the raging debate on environment versus development, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has warned that enforcement of environmental standards must not signal a return to the licence permit raj era. Addressing the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit organised by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)...

The Centre has asked Maharashtra to “drop” its case against Ilina Sen, the wife of jailed rights Activist Binayak Sen, a central government official said today. Ilina was booked for allegedly not informing police about foreign delegates’ participation at a conference organised by the Indian Association for Women’s Studies (IAWS) and the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Vishwavidyalaya (MGAV) at Wardha in January. The ATS Nagpur unit had noted in an FIR that Form...

Five years after it came into being, hundreds of NGOs and Activists would come together to recount the success and failure of MGNREGA at Udyog Maidan near Statue Circle on Wednesday. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act had come into effect on February 2, 2006. According to Nikhil Dey of the Suchna Evum Rozgar Ka Adhikar Abhiyan, "These five years have seen not just many people getting employment...

From being one of the top spenders in the country for the implementation of the MG NREGA two years ago, Rajasthan is fast sliding down the ladder. The state, this year, will be returning over half of the Rs 8,000 crore it had received from the Centre for its implementation. The revelation came at a job fair organised by the Suchna Evum Rozgar ka Adhikar Abhiyan and several other NGOs from...