-The Hindu MSF Secretary General Jerome Oberreit on the increasing threat to affordable health care worldwide. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors without Borders, the international humanitarian medical aid organisation that is active in 69 countries, serves populations affected by epidemics, armed conflicts, natural calamities and manmade disasters. MSF has relied heavily on generic drugs, much of which has been sourced from India, to deliver health care to some of the most...

-The Hindu How do various cities compare with each other in terms of crime? The ‘Crime in India 2015’ statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) last week answers these questions. Apart from national and state-level statistics, NCRB also compiles data for 53 major cities which have a population greater than 10 lakh. In 2015, 25 per cent of all crimes registered in major Indian cities that fell under the Indian...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Tens of thousands of people who relocated from riot-torn areas of Muzaffarnagar to areas with minority concentration find themselves out of the government's grid even three years after the violence forced them to flee their homes. This is the main finding of a survey conducted by NGOs Aman Biradari and Afkar India of the 65 colonies that have come up in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli to house the 30,000...

-Hindustan Times India will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its independence without all its children in school, according to a Unesco report. The Global Education Monitoring report of Unesco has said India can achieve universal primary education by 2050, universal lower secondary education by 2060 and universal upper secondary education by 2085. This is a sad commentary because at governmental level India has tried to universalise primary education though the funds...

Access to land and its resources is important since it determines the extent of poverty and deprivation one faces. Historically tribal populations and other traditional forest dwellers did not enjoy any legal entitlement such as ownership rights or user rights of the forest lands where they had been living since ages, both communally and individually. The Forest Rights Act (FRA) is, thus, seen as a progressive legislation that attempted to...