Asian Correspondent

Too much hot air is being blown into Monday’s Supreme Court judgment clarifying that fatwas are not binding on Muslims. That’s possibly because there’s a new government in New Delhi that is led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and some people have a morbid tendency of contextualising issues. In fact, if anyone contextualised anything, it was the Supreme Court. The court ruled that fatwas are not illegal, but are also not legally binding on those against whom they are made. It was hardly a...

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 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...

Almost one in four Right to Information (RTI) rejections in India have been made by the Ministry of Finance, according to the RTI Annual Return Reports for 2005-2010. Adjusted for the number of requests received, the Finance Ministry tops the rejection rate at 24 per cent, followed by the Prime Minister’s Office (12 per cent) and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (11 per cent), an analysis of the reports by the PRS Legislative Research (PRS) has revealed. The Finance Ministry possibly...

Food prices in India continue to rise when when international prices are stable because of the failure of domestic food management, wherein temporary shortages have led to price spikes, the Interntional Labour Organization (ILO) has said. Over the past two years wholesale food prices have increased by 40 per cent much more than during the mid-1990s and 2004, and the retail food prices have increased faster, the ILO said at the release of World of Work Report 2011: Making markets work for jobs...

ndia ranks 19th among 28 countries where public officials have to be bribed when doing business abroad, according to a survey of 3,000 business executives from developed and developing countries. Transparency International’s 2011 Bribe Payers Index, released today, ranks 28 leading international and regional exporting countries by the likelihood of their firms to bribe abroad. Companies from Russia and China, who invested US $120 billion overseas in 2010, are seen as most likely to pay bribes...

Things are not improving in India at all. In fact, things are going from bad to worse. India's rank in the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has fallen from 119 in 2010 to 134 this year. India’s HDI value for 2011 is 0.547—in the medium human development category—positioning the country at 134 out of 187 countries and territories. Between 1980 and 2011, India’s HDI value increased from 0.344 to 0.547, an increase of 59.0 per cent or average annual...