-The Hindustan Times Greater Noida: An RTI activist was abducted from Dankaur town in Gautam Budh Nagar district on December 13, burnt with cigarette butts on his private parts and beaten with iron rods before being dumped near a petrol pump in a neighbouring district four days later. A medical report of the Dankaur government hospital notes Anoop Singh, 29, has 40 burn injuries all over his body, including on his face,...

-Outlook Some 31 per cent of MPs in the Lok Sabha have criminal cases pending against them, and their pay package is 68 times higher than the national per capita income, according to the National Social Watch Report on Governance and Development-2013 released here today. "The pay package of MPs in India is higher than that of their counterparts in Singapore, Japan, Italy, and Pakistan. In terms of the ratio of the...

-The Hindu     The political executive and the permanent executive should realise they are public servants first and work in harmony to achieve the constitutional objectives There is a need to arrest the ‘laal batti' [red beacon] culture in public governance. The Supreme Court of India has been delivering a variety of judgments on matters of public governance, and these have been the subject of debate and discussion. Some of these related to...

-Outlook Ralegan Siddhi: Fasting for early passage of Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare today said he would end his fast only after the anti-corruption legislation is passed in both Houses of Parliament, and announced he did not wish to die soon as he had many other issues to fight for. Expressing satisfaction at the provisions of the amended Bill and thanking the government for it, he termed it as "good" for both the...

-Frontline Childhood TB has been neglected for decades, but in the past few years the WHO has begun to realise its real impact in terms of incidence, prevalence and mortality. THE number of annual new tuberculosis (TB) cases in India has been nearly 2.2 million for the past couple of years. Many of these infected people would have been in contact with children aged under five years before being diagnosed and,...