India Political Blog

For quite some time now, the Indian Supreme Court has been taking the stand that if a man offers a pledge of marriage to a women, and then has sex with her, and then moves away from his pledge of marriage, he can be convicted of rape. This was always a surprise, because even if you accept that in a relationship in this country, with its societal emphasis of marriage for a women, consensual sex cannot be equated with marriage. Even with a relationship of unequals, as long as the act of physical relations was voluntary, to call it a rape would seem illogical. After all, the scope for misuse is tremendous, relationships can break up after some period of cohabitation. The existing understanding seemed to be heavily biased against men. Well, it seems that the Supreme Court has thought again about this stand, and wants to evaluate it on a case by case basis:
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It has been fairly surprising to see the statements by the BJP over the nuclear deal when it was announced. If you refer to my previous post, it would seem that the BJP, for the sake of being in opposition, was going against a deal that it would have supported in all cases if it was in power.

If you consider the deal in all its points, there are many positive factors for the deal from the perspectives of the BJP such as
1. Closer engagement with the US,
2. Access to more dual-use technology that was restricted in the past,
3. Agreement by a number of experts in the nuclear field and strategic fields that this deal seems to be a good one,
4. Deal seems to be more in tune with what the middle class in this country wants,
5. Agreement with the Indian-American community that wants a closer relationship between the US and India
All these are factors that are valued by the support base of the US, and one would have expected the BJP to try to claim credit for the nuclear deal by claiming that the deal was following the path set by it.
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Travelers on buses are normally a harried and troubled lot. Information about bus services are hard to come by, with bus schedules many times not being accurate, and it gets difficult to plan for a journey. Many times, people are found to spend hours in the bus terminal, not knowing when the next bus is available. At such times, there is a lot of cursing about why this information is not available more easily. Well, in Gujarat the Road Transport Corporation has started a free SMS service whereby travelers can get to know route information easily through an SMS:

As a pilot test, the project was taken up in a part of the state where nearly 41,000 people used the service. Three of these requests for bus services, came from phone numbers in the UK and 306 from other states in India.
Secretary, GSRTC, P D Patel claimed that the methodology for receiving information is user friendly. Service seekers have to follow a particular format and send an SMS to 9998805656.
Soon after that they will receive an SMS on their mobile phone. The SMS will incorporate timings of the first five buses. If more information is required, passengers have to send the message again. This facility is also applicable for all state and inter-state routes. Patel said that this service was free.

Such a service, if followed properly and accurately, can be a big boon to users. People opting to get information using this service will no longer have to queue up, or ask all sorts of people about schedules and maybe even get wrong information. This is a good model that other states should replicate.