SHEILA DEVI, 54, of Nangal Kalan village in Haryana’s Sonepat district cannot comprehend how Taneja Developers and Infrastructure Ltd (TDI) procured her two-acre plot in 2004, ‘signed’ with thumb impressions of her husband Narender Singh, who died in 2002 and his brother Bhupender, who went missing the next year. The documents are obviously forged. But how did a farmers’ family get cheated in Haryana, where the land acquisition policy formed in...

The Union minister for communications and information technology, Kapil Sibal, is a knowledgeable lawyer, and someone who is reportedly committed to the freedom of speech. He would not lightly propose regulations that contravene Article 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression) of our Constitution. So how is one to explain his recent proposals on controlling online speech? Or even the immoderate IT Rules that have been in force since April? This controversy...

-The Indian Express Kapil Sibal, Union minister for communications and information technology, caused great consternation when he declared his intention to scour the Web of “objectionable content”. He showed reporters choice examples of material that maligned Islam, the PM and Sonia Gandhi, among others, and insisted that companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, make sure they conform to India’s “community standards” and weed this stuff out themselves. He also reportedly added...

Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption has a curious side-effect. It has turned the spotlight on India's lack of pre-legislative transparency. We may accept or dismiss team Anna's Jan Lokpal draft but his movement — and the subsequent build-up of hope and betrayal — has unwittingly exposed the systemic opaqueness in which our laws are conceived, written, debated and passed. The Lokpal Bill 2011 is one among 67-odd bills listed as...

The Centre for Internet & Societies (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO, recently filed an RTI query with the Department of Information Technology (DIT), asking for a list of websites blocked by the Indian government under the IT Act. The department handed them a list of 11 websites. It was just one department’s list, but this was the first time such a list was being made public. “The information given was not...