Five years after the massive indian Ocean tsunami, which left a devastating trail of death and destruction, millions of people have benefited from the influx of aid by rebuilding stronger infrastructure, social services and disaster warning systems than existed before the catastrophe, according to the United Nations agencies at the core of the recovery effort. The largest emergency relief response in history was prompted by the earthquake off the coast...

Copenhagen showed how fast and far India has traveled geo-politically. The same, alas, cannot be said about the health of the nation. On the international stage, India’s relentless focus on equity made us proud. The time has come to apply that principle at home. India’s ailing health delivery system is viewed as a worthy but dull topic on a normal day in a typical newsroom in the country. Typically, such neglected...

Educating disadvantaged and vulnerable groups is key  In the face of imports posing a competition to domestic manufacturing, the government has decided to come up with a National Consumer Policy to ensure uniform national and international standards in the various arms of the Central and State governments, the regulatory bodies and on consumer fora, and to lay down the guiding principles of complaint resolution. The Bureau of indian Standards (BIS)will...

She was a minor; her alleged assaulter a man with clout. The police initially turned her away; while a decade later, her case is still on in courts. And while Ruchika Girhotra’s tragic story may have got the nation’s and government’s ear, no one remembers the then 13-year-old Dalit girl who was allegedly gangraped on the night of the Dhuleti festival, a day after Holi, in a Vadodara village by...

In a bid to curb the tendency among bureaucrats belonging to the All-India Services (AIS), including indian Admini-trative Service (IAS) officers, to overstay on inter-cadre deputation for personal gains (location or otherwise), the government has decided to make the process of granting extension much harder. The Cabinet Committee on Appointment headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has in a meeting directed the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) to set out...