Over the years, the Indian government has banned thousands of websites and URLs in the country with the help of internet service providers or under the directive of the courts. In August 2015, the government banned at least 857 sites for their pornographic contents. Moreover, the government also banned about 170 objectional sites. And all this while, visiting these blocked sites and URLs were almost fine – that is until […]

Karnataka is set to copy Gujarat by making voting compulsory through a carrot-and-stick approach. It proposes to levy penalties for not voting, and incentivize voting by providing rewards. A senior official in the rural development and panchayat raj ministry said the state government has floated the idea of making voting mandatory in panchayat elections with a tentative fine of up to Rs 500 or two-day imprisonment for those who don’t […]

“You get down to survival mode.” That was blogger Roger Shuler’s state of mind after being arrested and hauled off to jail for writing about a politically connected Alabama lawyer. “Once you’re arrested I mean there’s not much you can do,” he told ThinkProgress in a conversation after his release, explaining that he felt powerless to handle the legal defense of his case. “Your hands are tied literally and figuratively […]