The government’s recent actions in notifying the Intermediary Guidelines for the internet with minimal public debate have resulted in the creation of a legal system that raises as many problems as it solves. The regulations as presently notified are arguably unconstitutional, arbitrary and vague and could pose a serious problem to the business of various intermediaries in the country (not to mention hampering internet penetration in the country) and also...

-The Hindu   Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has set off a firestorm of protest by demanding that ‘internet intermediaries' — specifically in this round, four social networking giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft, which enable hundreds of millions of individual users to publish and share on the worldwide web — remove inflammatory content as well as other text and images that might “offend Indian sensibilities.” As in...

We urgently need legislation that specifically addresses child abuse.  The Indian Penal Code does not spell out the definition of child abuse as a specific offence Even the Juvenile Justice Act does not specifically address the issue of child sexual abuse The government's decision to introduce a set of guidelines for service providers in the tourism sector in a move to prevent a repeat of incidents like the rape of a Russian...

Winner of a national award for Bitter Chocolate, an eye-opener book on child sexual abuse, author-activist Pinki Virani tells Nandita Sengupta the nation has let down its children in the Ruchika Girhotra case. You have said that government response to the Girhotra case is appalling. In the national outrage on Ruchika, government has missed the woods for the trees. I'm appalled that the law minister says we will now strengthen...