India
India known as the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh largest country by area and with more than 1.3 billion people, it is the second most populous country as well as the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives, while its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia; the Indian subcontinent was home to the urban Indus Valley Civilisation of the 3rd millennium BCE. In the following millennium, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism began to be composed. Social stratification, based on caste, emerged in the first millennium BCE, Buddhism and Jainism arose. Early political consolidations took place under the Gupta empires. In the medieval era, Zoroastrianism and Islam arrived, Sikhism emerged, all adding to the region's diverse culture.
Much of the north fell to the Delhi Sultanate. The economy expanded in the 17th century in the Mughal Empire. In the mid-18th century, the subcontinent came under British East India Company rule, in the mid-19th under British Crown rule. A nationalist movement emerged in the late 19th century, which under Mahatma Gandhi, was noted for nonviolent resistance and led to India's independence in 1947. In 2017, the Indian economy was the world's sixth largest by nominal GDP and third largest by purchasing power parity. Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the fastest-growing major economies and is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, corruption and inadequate public healthcare. A nuclear weapons state and regional power, it has the second largest standing army in the world and ranks fifth in military expenditure among nations. India is a federal republic governed under a parliamentary system and consists of 29 states and 7 union territories.
A pluralistic and multi-ethnic society, it is home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats. The name India is derived from Indus, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindush, equivalent to the Sanskrit word Sindhu, the historical local appellation for the Indus River; the ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as "The people of the Indus". The geographical term Bharat, recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country, is used by many Indian languages in its variations, it is a modernisation of the historical name Bharatavarsha, which traditionally referred to the Indian subcontinent and gained increasing currency from the mid-19th century as a native name for India. Hindustan is a Middle Persian name for India, it was introduced into India by the Mughals and used since then. Its meaning varied, referring to a region that encompassed northern India and Pakistan or India in its entirety; the name may refer to either the northern part of India or the entire country.
The earliest known human remains in South Asia date to about 30,000 years ago. Nearly contemporaneous human rock art sites have been found in many parts of the Indian subcontinent, including at the Bhimbetka rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh. After 6500 BCE, evidence for domestication of food crops and animals, construction of permanent structures, storage of agricultural surplus, appeared in Mehrgarh and other sites in what is now Balochistan; these developed into the Indus Valley Civilisation, the first urban culture in South Asia, which flourished during 2500–1900 BCE in what is now Pakistan and western India. Centred around cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and Kalibangan, relying on varied forms of subsistence, the civilization engaged robustly in crafts production and wide-ranging trade. During the period 2000–500 BCE, many regions of the subcontinent transitioned from the Chalcolithic cultures to the Iron Age ones; the Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed during this period, historians have analysed these to posit a Vedic culture in the Punjab region and the upper Gangetic Plain.
Most historians consider this period to have encompassed several waves of Indo-Aryan migration into the subcontinent from the north-west. The caste system, which created a hierarchy of priests and free peasants, but which excluded indigenous peoples by labeling their occupations impure, arose during this period. On the Deccan Plateau, archaeological evidence from this period suggests the existence of a chiefdom stage of political organisation. In South India, a progression to sedentary life is indicated by the large number of megalithic monuments dating from this period, as well as by nearby traces of agriculture, irrigation tanks, craft traditions. In the late Vedic period, around the 6th century BCE, the small states and chiefdoms of the Ganges Plain and the north-western regions had consolidated into 16 major oligarchies and monarchies that were known as the mahajanapadas; the emerging urbanisation gave rise to non-Vedic religious movements, two of which became independent religions. Jainism came into prominence during the life of Mahavira.
Buddhism, based on the teachings of Gautama Buddha, attracted followers from all social classes excepting the middle
Legal awareness
Legal awareness, sometimes called public legal education, is the empowerment of individuals regarding issues involving the law. Legal awareness helps to promote consciousness of legal culture, participation in the formation of laws and the rule of law. Public legal education, sometimes called civics education, comprises a range of activities intended to build public awareness and skills related to law and the justice system; this term refers to the fields of practice and study concerned with those activities, to a social and professional movement that advocates greater societal commitment to educating people about the law. Anna-Marie Marshall explains that "in order to realize their rights, people need to take the initiative to articulate them; this initiative, in turn, depends on the availability and the relevance of legal schema to people confronting problems." This is because laws exist as part of a larger organizational ecosystem in which the interests of the organization as well as those of the actors become inextricably linked to the ways in which they are enacted.
Distinct from the education of students in law school seeking a degree in law and the continuing professional education of lawyers and judges, public legal education is principally aimed at people who are not lawyers, judges, or degree-seeking law students. The term "public legal education" is related to, may encompass, several similar terms; the terms "public legal information" and "public legal education and information" emphasize a difference between educating and providing information. The term "community legal education" is common in Australia and the United States, where it refers to community-based public legal education activities led by legal aid organizations; the term "law-related education" refers to public legal education in primary and secondary schools, as opposed to PLE for adults and outside of school. According to the American Bar Association, Commission on Public Understanding, legal awareness is, "the ability to make critical judgments about the substance of the law, the legal process, available legal resources and to utilize the legal system and articulate strategies to improve it is legal literacy".
The Canadian Bar Association defines legal literacy as, "the ability to understand words used in a legal context, to draw conclusions from them, to use those conclusions to take action."With little change to the Multiple Action Research Group's definition, legal awareness can be defined as, "critical knowledge of legal provisions and processes, coupled with the skills to use this knowledge to respect and realize rights and entitlements". The "continuum approach" considers legal literacy as, "a capacity spread along a continuum, with lawyers and judges at one end and incapable laypersons at the other"; this approach was adopted by the legal scholar White who considered legal literacy to mean, "that degree of competence in legal discourse required for meaningful and active life in our legalistic and litigious culture". Author Bilder defines legal literacy as a, "spectrum of functional skills", related to the conduct of litigation; the continuum approach explains, "a certain degree of legal literacy is required for effective participation in modern society, but it is not necessary for the average citizen to reach the professional standard of'thinking like a lawyer.'"One of the recent approaches considers legal literacy as a metaphor.
According to this view, the term is "intended to suggest some parallels between the institution of the law, a system of language to be mastered, knowledge gained and understanding achieved". These authors suggest that the term legal literacy can function as a model for educators who seek to promote such literacy. Proponents of legal literacy may thus look to the teaching of language for guidance. Anoop Kumar, a researcher of Legal Literacy Mission, says in his study, "the legislature of the state and the parliament, while enacting the legislation, consider the objectives of it; some laws lay down the substantive rights of the masses and some touch upon the procedural aspect of certain laws. But it is due to lack of awareness of beneficiaries that most of the legislations are ineffective at the stage of their execution."Legal awareness can empower people to demand justice and effective remedies at all levels. Legal needs always stand to become crisis oriented because their ignorance prevents them from anticipating legal troubles and approaching a lawyer for consultation and advice in time.
This magnifies the impact of their legal difficulties when they come. Without literacy people can get alienated from law; this may evolve into a situation which results in people coming into conflict with the law, or being unable to obtain help from it. Courts have acknowledged the barrier raised by a lack of literacy to asserting guaranteed rights effectively. Low literacy may block people’s access to justice. At times, literacy requirements have been used to block access to rights and benefits Goals of the legal literacy programs can be broadly divided in three types. Namely educational and critical. In Reading the Legal World, author Laird Hunter expects legal literacy to achieve: "People using the legal system must be able to guide themselves through a process that they understand and, at appropriate places along the way" recognize they have a legal right or responsibility, in order to exercise or assume it.
Postgraduate education
Postgraduate education, or graduate education in North America, involves learning and studying for academic or professional degrees, academic or professional certificates, academic or professional diplomas, or other qualifications for which a first or bachelor's degree is required, it is considered to be part of higher education. In North America, this level is referred to as graduate school; the organization and structure of postgraduate education varies in different countries, as well as in different institutions within countries. This article outlines the basic types of courses and of teaching and examination methods, with some explanation of their history. There are two main types of degrees studied for at the postgraduate level: academic and vocational degrees; the term degree in this context means the moving from one stage or level to another, first appeared in the 13th century. Although systems of higher education date back to ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient India and Arabian Peninsula, the concept of postgraduate education depends upon the system of awarding degrees at different levels of study, can be traced to the workings of European medieval universities Italians.
University studies took six years for a bachelor's degree and up to twelve additional years for a master's degree or doctorate. The first six years taught the faculty of the arts, the study of the seven liberal arts: arithmetic, astronomy, music theory, grammar and rhetoric; the main emphasis was on logic. Once a Bachelor of Arts degree had been obtained, the student could choose one of three faculties—law, medicine, or theology—in which to pursue master's or doctor's degrees; the degrees of master and doctor were for some time equivalent, "the former being more in favour at Paris and the universities modeled after it, the latter at Bologna and its derivative universities. At Oxford and Cambridge a distinction came to be drawn between the Faculties of Law and Theology and the Faculty of Arts in this respect, the title of Doctor being used for the former, that of Master for the latter." Because theology was thought to be the highest of the subjects, the doctorate came to be thought of as higher than the master's.
The main significance of the higher, postgraduate degrees was that they licensed the holder to teach. In most countries, the hierarchy of postgraduate degrees is: Master's degrees; these are sometimes placed in a further hierarchy, starting with degrees such as the Master of Arts and Master of Science degrees the Master of Philosophy degree, the Master of Letters degree. In the UK, master's degrees may be taught or by research: taught master's degrees include the Master of Science and Master of Arts degrees which last one year and are worth 180 CATS credits, whereas the master's degrees by research include the Master of Research degree which lasts one year and is worth 180 CATS or 90 ECTS credits and the Master of Philosophy degree which lasts two years. In Scottish Universities, the Master of Philosophy degree tends to be by research or higher master's degree and the Master of Letters degree tends to be the taught or lower master's degree. In many fields such as clinical social work, or library science in North America, a master's is the terminal degree.
Professional degrees such as the Master of Architecture degree can last to three and a half years to satisfy professional requirements to be an architect. Professional degrees such as the Master of Business Administration degree can last up to two years to satisfy the requirement to become a knowledgeable business leader. Doctorates; these are further divided into academic and professional doctorates. An academic doctorate can be awarded as a Doctor of Philosophy degree or as a Doctor of Science degree; the Doctor of Science degree can be awarded in specific fields, such as a Doctor of Science in Mathematics degree, a Doctor of Agricultural Science degree, a Doctor of Business Administration degree, etc. In some parts of Europe, doctorates are divided into the Doctor of Philosophy degree or "junior doctorate", the "higher doctorates" such as the Doctor of Science degree, awarded to distinguished professors. A doctorate is the terminal degree in most fields. In the United States, there is little distinction between a Doctor of Philosophy degree and a Doctor of Science degree.
In the UK, Doctor of Philosophy degrees are equivalent to 540 CATS credits or 270 ECTS European credits, but this is not always the case as the credit structure of doctoral degrees is not defined. In some countries such as Finland and Sweden, there is the degree of Licentiate, more advanced than a master's degree but less so than a Doctorate. Credits required are about half of those required for a doctoral degree. Coursework requirements are the same as for a doctorate, but the extent of original research required is not as high as for doctorate. Medical doctors for example ar
The Week (Indian magazine)
The Week is an Indian news magazine founded in the year 1982 and is published by The Malayala Manorama Co. Ltd; the magazine is published from Kochi and is printed in Delhi, Mumbai and Kottayam. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it is the largest circulated English news magazine in India; the Week was launched by The Malayala Manorama Co. Ltd in December, 1982, has had two chief editors, before the designation was discontinued. K. M. Mathew, the founder chief editor, remained in office until 25 December 1988. Popularly known as Mathukuttychayan, he was chairman of the Press Trust of India, president of the Indian Newspaper Society and chairman of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, he died on 1 August 2010. The obit which appeared in The Times of India said, "The acclaimed English news magazine-The Week-was his brainchild." K. M. Mathew's eldest son, Mammen Mathew, took over on 1 January 1989, continued until 9 December 2007, he is chief editor of the Malayala Manorama daily, the group's flagship publication.
The Week does not have a chief editor. K. M. Mathew's second son, Philip Mathew, managing editor since 1 January 1989, is the highest-ranked editor. Philip Mathew, the first publisher of the magazine, held the post until December 1988. Jacob Mathew: 1 January 1989 till date. K. M. Mathew's third son, he is president of WAN-IFRA, he is the first Indian to hold the post. The magazine has had two editors. V. K. B. Nair: 26 December 1982 to 3 June 1984. T. V. R. Shenoy: 10 June 1984 to 11 December 1988; the editor-in-charge is responsible for selection of news under The Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867. The present editor-in-charge, T R Gopaalakrishnan, took over on 18 December 1988; the magazine was designed in-house, was periodically redesigned. A major content overhaul was led by Peter Lim and former editor-in-chief of The Straits Times/Singapore Press Holdings, he authored the book Chronicle of Singapore: Fifty Years of Headline News. The two major redesigns were led by: Peter Ong on 8 November 1998.
Dr Mario Garcia on 20 February 2005. Based in Sydney, Ong was Picture & Graphics Editor of The Straits Times, he is principal consultant at Checkout Australia, was regional director for the Society of News Design. Garcia owns Garcia Media. Both of them helped redesign the Malayala Manorama. In the early years, cartoonist Mario Miranda designed many covers for The Week, he had a regular pocket cartoon in the magazine. The Week does not have published stylebook, but follows the down style for capitalisation, its dateline carries the pull date, not the date of issue. The Week has these regular guest columns: General's Jottings by General Bikram Singh DeTour by Shobhaa De. Forthwrite by Meenakshi Lekhi. Art to Heart, an art and culture column, by Amjad Ali Khan and Sanjana Kapoor. Last Word by Shashi Tharoor, Saurav Ganguly, Sanjaya Baru, Mallika Sarabhai, Nandita Das and and Binayak Sen. Schizo-Nation by Anuja Chauhan. Strange Encounters by Jerry Pinto. Chef's Choice by Hemant Oberoi. Sound Bite by Anita Pratap.
Sen-sibility by Geeti Sen. Mystic Eye by Jaggi Vasudev. Mindscape by Vandana Kohli. In addition to the guests, there are two staff columns. Power Point by K. S. Sachidananda Murthy, resident editor in New Delhi. PMO Beat by chief of bureau, New Delhi. Former columnists of the magazine include Priyanka Chopra, Khushwant Singh, P. C. Alexander, R. N. Malhotra, former foreign secretary A. P. Venkateswaran, Harsha Bhogle, NDTV 24x7 managing editor Sreenivasan Jain, Manjula Padmanabhan, Santosh Desai and Antara Dev Sen, among others. Two supplements go free with The Week: Health, a fortnightly on fitness; the Wallet, a monthly guide to personal finance and investment. The standalone magazines are: The Man: The Man, a monthly lifestyle magazine for men WatchTime India: A quarterly magazine on luxury watches Smartlife: A monthly magazine on wellness and lifestyle Livingetc is a monthly magazine on home and interiors The Week was the title sponsor, of the inaugural Hay Festival in India. Held in Thiruvananthapuram, from 12 to 14 November 2010, the festival was held at Kanakakunnu Palace, the former summer retreat of the Travancore royal family.
Writers and speakers for the event included Mani Shankar Aiyar, Rosie Boycott, Gillian Clarke, William Dalrymple, Tishani Doshi, Sonia Faleiro, Sebastian Faulks, Nik Gowing, Manu Joseph, N. S. Madhavan, Jaishree Misra, Vivek Narayanan, Michelle Paver, Basharat Peer, Hannah Rothschild, K. Satchidanandan, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schama, Vikram Seth, C. P. Surendran, Miguel Syjuco, Shashi Tharoor, Amrita Tripathi, Pavan Varma and Paul Zacharia; the event closed with a concert by Bob Geldof. In 2001, Special Cover Designer Ajay Pingle entered the Limca Book of Records for designing the most number of covers for an Indian newsmagazine. 2009 – Brother Christudas, for Little Flower Leprosy Welfare Association 2010 – Satinath Sarangi, for voicing Bhopal disaster victims 2011 – Ajeet Singh, for Guria 2018 – Nilesh Desai, Lighting up the Darkness 2017 - Dr. Ramesh Awasthi and Dr. Manisha Gupte The Week
Jagdish Bhagwati
Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati is an Indian-born American economist. He is a University Professor of economics and law at Columbia University. Bhagwati is notable for his advocacy of free trade. Bhagwati was born in 1934, into a Gujarati family in the Bombay Presidency during the British Raj, received a BA from Sydenham College, Mumbai, he traveled to England to study at St. John's College, receiving a second BA at Cambridge in 1956. Between 1957 and 1959 he studied at Nuffield College, Oxford, he received the Ph. D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 for a thesis titled "Essays in International Economics", supervised by Charles P. Kindleberger. Bhagwati is married to Padma Desai a Columbia economist and Russia-specialist, he is the brother of P. N. Bhagwati, former Chief Justice of India and of S. N. Bhagwati, an eminent neurosurgeon. Bhagwati and Desai's joint 1970 OECD study India: Planning for Industrialization was a notable contribution at the time. After completing his PhD, Bhagwati returned to India in 1961, first to teach at the Indian Statistical Institute, as professor of international trade at the Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi, from 1962 to 1968.
From 1968 until 1980, Bhagwati was an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bhagwati serves on the Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch and on the board of scholars of the Centre for Civil Society, he is a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. Bhagwati has served as an external advisor to the Director General of the World Trade Organization in 2001, as a special policy advisor on globalization to the United Nations in 2000, as an economics policy advisor to the Director-General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, from 1991 to 1993. In 2000, Bhagwati was signatory to an amicus briefing, coordinated by the American Enterprise Institute, with the Supreme Court of the United States to contend that the Environmental Protection Agency should, contrary to a prior ruling, be allowed to take into account the costs of regulations when setting environmental standards. In January 2004, Bhagwati published In Defense of Globalization, a book in which he argues:... this process has a human face, but we need to make that face more agreeable.
In May, 2004, Bhagwati was one of the experts. In 2006, Bhagwati was a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons who reviewed the work of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. In early 2010, Bhagwati joined the advisory board of the Institute for Migrant Rights, Cianjur – Indonesia. At present, he is professor of economics and law at Columbia University. Mahalanobis Memorial Medal of the Indian Econometric Society Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Seidman Distinguished Award in International Political Economy Padma Vibhushan Award Lifetime Achievement Award of the Indian Chamber of Commerce Order of the Rising Sun and Silver Star Other awards include the Bernhard Harms Prize, the Kenan Enterprise Award, the Freedom Prize, the John R. Commons Award, he has received honorary degrees from the University of Sussex and Erasmus University, as well as others. Paul Samuelson, on the occasion of Bhagwati's 70th birthday festschrift conference in Gainesville, Florida on January 2005 said: I measure a scholar's prolific-ness not by the mere number of his publishings.
Just as the area of a rectangle equals its width times its depth, the quality of a lifetime accomplishment must weight each article by its novelties and wisdoms.... Jagdish Bhagwati is more like Haydn: a composer of more than a hundred symphonies and no one of them other than top notch.... In the struggle to improve the lot of mankind, whether located in advanced economies or in societies climbing the ladder out of poverty, Jagdish Bhagwati has been a tireless partisan of that globalization which elevates global total-factor – productivities both of richest America and poorest regions of Asia and Africa. Jagdish Bhagwati was the fictional winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in The Simpsons episode Elementary School Musical. Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya. Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries. PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-61-039271-X. Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya. India's Tryst with Destiny: Debunking the Myths that Undermine Progress and Addressing New Challenges.
HarperCollins. ISBN 978-9350295854. Jagdish Bhagwati. Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-533165-6. Jagdish Bhagwati. In Defense of Globalization. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195330939. Bhagwati, Jagdish. Free Trade Today. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691117300. Jagdish Bhagwati; the Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-52327-2. James H. Mathis, Jagdish Bhagwati. Regional Trade Agreements in the GATT/WTO: Article XXIV and the Internal Trade Requirement. Norwell/TMC Asser Press. ISBN 90-6704-139-4. Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Robert E. Hudec. Fair Trade and Harmonization, Vol. 1: Economic Analysis. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02401-2. CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list Jagdish N. Bhagwati. Economics and World Order from the 1970's to the 1990's. MacMillan. ISBN 978-0029034705. CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list Bhagwati, Jagdish (March
Shivraj Patil
Shivraj Vishwanath Patil is an Indian politician, the Governor of the state of Punjab and Administrator of the Union Territory of Chandigarh from 2010 to 2015. He was the Speaker of the 10th Lok Sabha from 1991 to 1996 and served in Manmohan Singh's cabinet as Union Minister of Home Affairs from 2004 to 2008, he served in the Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi cabinets as Minister of Defence during the 1980s. Patil resigned from the post of Home Minister on 30 November 2008, following widespread criticism raised after terrorist attacks on Mumbai, took moral responsibility for the security lapse that led to the attacks. Patil was born in 1935 in the village of Chakur in the Latur district of the princely state of Hyderabad, now Maharashtra, India, he attended Osmania University, earning a degree in Science and studied Law at Bombay University. During 1967–69, he was involved in local government. Keshavrao Sonawane and Manikrao Sonawane helped Shivaraj Patil to get his first break to stand from Latur Constituency.
Patil belongs to the Lingayat community. He married Vijaya Patil in June 1963, he is a follower of Sathya Sai Baba. From 1973 to 1980, he was legislator of Latur Rular constituency of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly for two terms of 1973 to 1978 and 1978 to 1980 during which time he held various positions such as Chairman of Public Undertakings Committee, Deputy Minister, Deputy Speaker of the Assembly and Speaker of the Assembly. In 1980, he was elected to the 7th Lok Sabha from Latur constituency. By 1999, he had won seven successive Lok Sabha elections in 1980, 1984, 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998 and 1999. In 2004 Lok Sabha election, he lost to Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Rupatai Patil Nilangekar. First inducted in the Indira Gandhi-led government in as Minister of State for Defence, he was given independent charge of the Commerce Ministry, from where he was shifted to Science and Technology, Atomic Energy, Electronics and Ocean Development. During 1983–86, he was Vice-President of CSIR India.
He served on various committees including those on Defence, External Affairs, Finance and Allowances of members of parliament. In the Rajiv Gandhi government, he was Minister for Personnel, Defence production and held independent charge of Civil Aviation and Tourism, he has held a number of important positions in the party since Sonia Gandhi took over the presidency of the party. He is known for introducing the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award, India in 1992, he was the chairman of the manifesto committee of the party during the 1999 Lok Sabha election. As speaker of the Lok Sabha, he had begun or contributed in initiatives on information dissemination to members of the Parliament, construction of Parliament Library Building and broadcast of Lok Sabha proceedings, including live broadcast of Question Hour of both houses of the parliament. Between 1991–1995, he was a member/leader of Indian parliamentary delegations to various international parliamentary conferences, he became Home Minister in 2004.
A former Lok Sabha speaker, Shivraj Patil lost in the 2004 polls from Latur constituency in Maharashtra, but has still landed up the second most important position in the Union Cabinet—that of the Home Minister. He was elected to the Rajya Sabha in July 2004. Seen as an ineffective minister, his tenure as home minister was marred by one debacle after another and he faced increasing calls for his resignation forcing it due to the mishandling in the events leading up to and after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Not to be forgotten are the 2006 Malegaon bombings, at a Muslim graveyard. United States Ambassador David Mulford in an embassy cable described his removal after the Mumbai terrorist attack as inevitable and called him "inept" and "asleep on the watch". Patil is accused for not sending the Central Reserve Police Force to Nandigram after repeated requests by the West Bengal government, to restore law and order in the area and the events resulted in police firing and killing of men and women in Nandigram.
Patil's name was considered a candidate in 2007 presidential election. However, after the Left opposed his candidacy, Sonia Gandhi proposed Pratibha Patil, Governor of Rajasthan, as the presidential candidate. Shivraj Patil was considered a possible candidate for the post of Vice-President of India, his extensive parliamentary experience and his reputation for fairness were said to be the main advantages on his side. On 30 November 2008, just four days after Bombay blasts, Patil resigned from his position of Home Minister in Union Cabinet taking moral responsibility for the security lapse that led to the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Shivraj Patil is referred as nero of India, he was reported to have been changing clothes for public appearances while the country was under a terror attack. His actions are compared to Nero who played his fiddle while the city burned as Patil focused on changing his clothes while the country was witnessing a terror attack, he is criticized to have omitted this episode from his autobiography
Corporate law
Corporate law is the body of law governing the rights and conduct of persons, companies and businesses. It refers to the theory of corporations. Corporate law describes the law relating to matters which derive directly from the life-cycle of a corporation, it thus encompasses the formation, funding and death of a corporation. While the minute nature of corporate governance as personified by share ownership, capital market, business culture rules differ, similar legal characteristics - and legal problems - exist across many jurisdictions. Corporate law regulates how corporations, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders such as consumers, the community, the environment interact with one another. Whilst the term company or business law is colloquially used interchangeably with corporate law, business law refers to wider concepts of commercial law, that is, the law relating to commercial or business related activities. In some cases, this may include matters relating to financial law; when used as a substitute for corporate law, business law means the law relating to the business corporation, i.e. capital raising, company formation, etc.
Academics identify four legal characteristics universal to business enterprises. These are: Separate legal personality of the corporation Limited liability of the shareholders Transferable shares Delegated management under a board structure. Available and user-friendly corporate law enables business participants to possess these four legal characteristics and thus transact as businesses. Thus, corporate law is a response to three endemic opportunism: conflicts between managers and shareholders, between controlling and non-controlling shareholders. A corporation may be called a company. In the United States, a company may or may not be a separate legal entity, is used synonymous with "firm" or "business." According to Black's Law Dictionary, in America a company means "a corporation — or, less an association, partnership or union — that carries on industrial enterprise." Other types of business associations can include partnerships, or trusts, or companies limited by guarantee. Corporate law deals with companies that are incorporated or registered under the corporate or company law of a sovereign state or their sub-national states.
The defining feature of a corporation is its legal independence from the shareholders. Under corporate law, corporations of all sizes have separate legal personality, with limited or unlimited liability for its shareholders. Shareholders control the company through a board of directors which, in turn delegates control of the corporation's day-to-day operations to a full-time executive. Shareholders' losses, in the event of liquidation, are limited to their stake in the corporation, they are not liable for any remaining debts owed to the corporation's creditors; this rule is called limited liability, it is why the names of corporations end with "Ltd.". or some variant such as "Inc." or "plc"). Under all legal systems corporations have much the same legal rights and obligations as individuals. In some jurisdictions, this extends to allow corporations to exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, they may be responsible for human rights violations. Just as they are "born" into existence through its members obtaining a certificate of incorporation, they can "die" when they lose money into insolvency.
Corporations can be convicted of criminal offences, such as corporate fraud and corporate manslaughter. In order to understand the role corporate law plays within commercial law, it is useful to understand the historical development of the corporation, the development of modern company law. Although some forms of companies are thought to have existed during Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, the closest recognizable ancestors of the modern company did not appear until the 16th century. With increasing international trade, Royal charters were granted in Europe to merchant adventurers; the Royal charters conferred special privileges on the trading company. Traders in these entities traded stock on their own account, but the members came to operate on joint account and with joint stock, the new Joint stock company was born. Early companies were purely economic ventures; the development of company law in Europe was hampered by two notorious "bubbles" in the 17th century, which set the development of companies in the two leading jurisdictions back by over a century in popular estimation.
Companies inevitably, returned to the forefront of commerce, although in
