-The Hindu Justice Markandey Katju, Chairman, Press Council of India, argues that the media has a very important role to play in helping the country make the transition from an old feudal society to a modern industrial one quickly, and without much pain. The Role the Media should be playing in India by Justice Markandey Katju, (former Judge, Supreme Court of India), Chairman, Press Council of India To understand the role which...

Concerned over the large number of child deaths due to measles every year, the Centre has launched a massive anti-measles vaccination drive. More than 13 crore children are expected to be covered under the Measles Catch-up Campaign, irrespective of their previous measles vaccination status. The drive has been launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, with support from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD), for carrying out the...

Poverty lines have been in the news again. This round started when a Planning Commission affidavit to the Supreme Court placing the poverty line at Rs 26 per capita per day (rural), Rs 32 (urban), raised a furore over the use of these to set a cap on the percentage of the population covered by the food security Bill. Since then, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. The latest...

The Congress rules state and the centre, but money set aside for Rajasthan’s malnourished tribal children does not reach dysfunctional crèches and other urgent needs Three-year-old Bagmati Sahariya lies listlessly on a string cot inside an unlit mud-and-thatched home in Baran district’s Amrod village, 292km south of Rajasthan’s capital Jaipur. When her father Janki Lal (36), a daily wage labourer, lifts her on his shoulder, her bony hands and legs dangle...

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet.  But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...