Reports

The dark, dingy room from which weaver Taufeeq Ahmed operates is tell-tale. It is crammed to the last inch. There’s barely any leg space for him, leave alone his occasional visitors. The room is poorly lit, and will never provide you with a whiff of fresh air. Taufeeq’s weather-beaten face belies his age. The thick glasses wear heavy as he leans into his loom, and he does not have to make up a face to brood. He looks every bit a man resigned to his fate. Taufeeq does not look impoverished, but...

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) apparently believes in different strokes for different folks. The regulator has been adopting different yardsticks for penalising different insurance companies for the same purported offence. Earlier this year, the public sector United India Insurance Company was fined Rs 5 lakh under the provisions of section 64 of the Insurance Act, 1938, for opening 35 new branches across the country without its prior permission. The IRDA, however...

Can a potential Rs 17,500 crore penalty for gross violation of the Insurance Act be whittled down to Rs 20 lakh? Surely not, one may say. But this, in fact, is exactly what the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) has done for Reliance General Insurance Co, an Anil Ambani group company. Simply put, this is the violation. Reliance sold 3.5 lakh health insurance policies without informing IRDA - which is illegal. So when IRDA found this out, in an order dated 23 July 2009, it...

Minutes after I had put up a status message on Facebook saying that I was planning to pen first-hand accounts of domestic violence survivors, I was flooded with messages. Among those who responded was my friend, Nargis Yousuf *, from Bangalore. Er, was she a victim? No. But she had an account of someone. “Would you need the person to narrate it herself? As in, meet her?”, she asked. I thought otherwise. “But she won’t be able to speak to you here (on Facebook).”, Nargis added. So, was this...

More than four persons per day were killed in police and judicial custody in India between 2001 and 2010. The total of 14,231 persons includes 1,504 deaths in police custody and 12,727 deaths in judicial custody from 2001-2002 to 2009-2010 as per the cases submitted to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). The New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights in its report, Torture in India 2011, released today said that a large majority of these deaths were a direct consequence of torture in...

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is not just an environmental group — it is a monolith. It is also a big brand. And like all big corporate brands, it manages its media coverage quite well. There's so much of positive stories there to be read in the print media or seen on television, that you don't even know that there's a dark underbelly somewhere. Things, in fact,are so murky that your faith in the hitherto thought of as venerable NGO will stand shaken. Probably, for good. Just as most negative...

The state government in Manipur is forcefully evicting families living on Loktak. Since Tuesday, the state police has used brute force to chase alleged illegal settlers away from their homes, including burning nearly 200 huts. It is being alleged that the eviction is in fact a security operation, and not to preserve the environment under the controversial Loktak Lake (Protection) Act, 2006, as claimed. State government officials started burning down floating huts, khangpokshang, built over...

An ill-conceived move by the Karnataka government allowing the extension of working hours for women working in the IT industry in Bangalore is drawing flak both from women and IT professionals. IT companies in Bangalore at a recent conference had adopted a resolution urging the government to extend working hours deadline for female employees to 10 pm. Till now IT/ITeS companies were responsible for providing transport to female employees after 8 pm. "Extending the deadline will make them...

If the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was still looking for obvious signs of a slowdown, it cannot get find another better than this one. India's new car sales in October fell the most in more than a decade in the face of rising fuel costs, expensive loans, and prolonged inflationary pressures. Sales of passenger cars were down 23.8 per cent, while production dropped 28.1 per cent when compared to the same period last year, according to the Society of Indian Automobile...

Wipro has retained the top slot in environmental NGO Greenpeace's latest Guide to Greener Electronics. HCL Infosystem is placed second in the Indian version. The international version ranks the IT manufacturing company HP at the top, taking the lead over Dell and Nokia. Three new companies are included in the latest version of the guide. Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturer of the Blackberry phone, is included in the international version while Chirag Computers and SAI InfoSystem are included...