KANDHAMAL: The administration, the Sal trees in the hills, vast stretches of barren fields and nondescript hamlets of this Orissa district give an impression that everything is alright with the people living here. But the reality on the ground is different. A visit to some villages where Christian families were attacked in the aftermath of the killing of VHP leader Lakshmanananda Saraswati showed that rehabilitation of the riot-hit population was nowhere...

Defending the alternative model for undergraduate medical education to create a separate cadre of “rural doctors,” Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Thursday that the scheme would not compromise with the quality of medical education or reduce the importance of trained and specialised doctors. Inaugurating a two-day national workshop here to discuss the programme for starting a specialised course of Bachelor of Rural Medicine and...

Is it the Supreme Court of India, or the Supreme Court for Indians?  The law must be equally open to the humblest, simplest and little member of the community A decentralised system of judicature is a paramount property for democracy to have élan A Supreme Court of India, and a Supreme Court for all Indians: these two versions can be radically different in terms of principle and content. The Preamble to...

Points to plight of city journalists and small-town stringers  City journalists employed on contract basis as well as small-town stringers working for small sums are both victims of the lack of effective trade unionism in the news industry, Harish Rawat, Minister of State for Labour and Employment, said here on Tuesday. Speaking at the diamond jubilee celebrations of the Press Trust of India organised by the news agency’s employees unions,...

While a country like China devised practical ways to deliver healthcare to rural populations by deploying its band of ‘barefoot doctors’ from the 1960s in a transitional phase, and then went on to expand full-fledged medical education facilities that enabled national coverage to a great degree, chronic shortages of doctors in rural India six decades after Independence remain a worry. The allopathic doctor-patient ratio is a dismal 1:1,722. Nevertheless, the...