The government is not keen to change the classification of victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy in its curative petition before the Supreme Court and allow higher compensation for thousands or admit to a higher number of fatalities, although it is ready to consider doubling the relief demanded for the small number it currently accepts as dead and those permanently scarred due to the lethal gas leak. The government seems to...

While one year has passed without polio caused by natural poliovirus, we can claim complete eradication only after we ensure the absence of wild and vaccine polioviruses in the population. Today, India passes one whole year without polio caused by natural (wild) poliovirus — a major milestone towards polio eradication. This spells relief from an agonising decade of wild polioviruses refusing to surrender. Many experts believed that India posed the greatest...

Activists working for the rights of tribes people are concerned about their portrayal in the media in India. London-headquartered Survival International, which lobbies for the rights of tribal people across the world, said it is concerned about how tribals are viewed in India. “They are often referred to as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’, implying that their way of life is in some way inferior and needs to be ‘developed,’” Survival’s South Asia campaigner...

-PTI Indian bureaucracy is the worst in Asia with a 9.21 rating out of 10, according to a report by a prestigious consulting firm based in Singapore. India fared worst than Vietnam (rated at 8.54), Indonesia (8.37), Philippines (7.57) and China (7.11), said the report released today by   Hong Kong-based Political & Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. Singapore remained the best with a rating of 2.25, followed by Hong Kong (3.53), Thailand (5.25) Taiwan...

Migration is fuelling India's HIV epidemic. National AIDS Control Organisation's latest figures show that besides high risk populations like sex workers, the highest burden of HIV is among migrants - 3.6%, which is 10 times the HIV prevalence among the general population.  With migration rates increasing, the prevalence will only get worse. According to the 2001 census, 30.1% of the population was considered to have migrated (314 million) - a considerable...