Reports

It has been 15 years since Khajan Singh’s land went under water. A single crop earlier could have feed him and his family for two long years. But today, they are a victim of dire hunger and unmitigated malnutrition. Khajan is from Aanjanwada village of Alirajpur district in Madhya Pradesh. It is one of the 15 villages been affected in Alirajpur due to the submergence caused by the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project (SSP). The only way to reach this community is by a boat from the nearest small town. SSP...

Reliance Entertainment has gone overboard after obtaining a John Doe order from the Delhi High Court to prevent piracy of its film Bodyguard, that was released this week. The company has sent over two thousand notices to internet service providers, seeking bans on file-sharing websites, and website owners, requesting them to find and remove all offending content that is currently hosted on their websites or may be uploaded in future. The court order restrains websites, cable operators and ISPs...

This should come across as good news to one and all – Adidas has joined Nike and Puma in committing publicly to eliminate all discharges of hazardous chemicals throughout their supply chain and across the entire lifecycle of their products by 2020. The move from Adidas comes after a relentless detox campaign waged by environmental organisation Greenpeace International on the issue since July this year. Adidas acknowledged that Greenpeace had directed its campaign towards sporting goods companies...

A circular issued by the Kerala government directing the public education department to deploy online school management software called Sampoorna in schools across the state has drawn flak from civil liberties activists. According to the circular, details of as many as 6 million students spanning over 15,000 schools in the state would be captured in this scheme. All schoolchildren will soon have unique identification numbers (UID), which will help in tracking their movements in educational...

Kashmir’s much-hyped literary festival has been cancelled. The organisers of ‘Harud: The Autumn Literature Festival’, scheduled for September 24-26 in Srinagar, cited the possibility of violence as the main reason behind this decision. The festival secretariat said they were concerned about the possibility of protests and the "heightened" nature of the debate. The debate in question was the incisive criticism that the organisers faced from writers, journalists, filmmakers and artists, among...

Many university students use scholarly databases like they would Google, revealing an astonishingly poor understanding of how to refine searches for better research results, a US study has found. The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, a two-year study of the student research process involving five US universities, included extensive interviews with students, librarians and other academics in an effort to better understand 21st Century student research habits...

This has taken a long time – but would be more than welcome for people of the Northeast. The government has announced that it will set up separate High Courts for each of the Northeast states. Setting up of separate High Courts would be subject to creation of necessary infrastructural facilities by the respective state governments. Announcing this in the Lok Sabha on Friday, Salman Khursheed, Union Minister for Law and Justice, said that at present the governments of Manipur, Meghalaya and...

Speech of Isak Chishi Swu, Yaruiwo (President) of the Government of the People's Republic of Nagalim (GPRN) on the occasion of the 65th Naga Independence Day celebrations, August 14, 2011. My dear Naga people, Six decades ago on this historic day, the 14th of August 1947, the Naga people took a historic decision to remain as an independent nation and subsequently held a plebiscite in 1951 in affirmation of that decision. Since then the conflict started between the Indian Armed Forces and the...

The attacks carried out between 2005 and 2009 on Indian students studying in Australia should not be construed as an evidence of racism, a study has insisted. The attacks had previously created a diplomatic row between India and Australia. Indians studying in Australia, as well as other foreign students, were “less likely or as likely to be victims of physical assaults and other theft” than Australia’s population in general, a report released by the Canberra-based Australian Institute of...

The Reliance Communications website describes itself as India’s number one network. It certainly isn’t if you consider the number of subscribers it has lost in the first five months since the mobile number portability (MNP) facility was introduced in India – it lost a whopping 1,166,643 net subscribers till June 30. Reliance’s loss is more than double the second company in the dubious rankings – state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), which lost 573,142 subscribers. The third is Tata...