When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young BRIde years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives. "My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village...

-The Hindustan Times   Opposing the move to dilute the RTI Act, BJP leader LK Advani on Saturday said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's talk of a relook at the Act could be due to "sharp" differences between some of his ministers giving the impression of a "civil war" within the government. "I see no reason for the talk of a critical relook at the RTI except for the fact that differences between (Union...

-The Hindu   Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member BRInda Karat has requested Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad to take action against those responsible for alleged violation of guidelines in the Human Pipillomavirus (HPV) project. In a letter to Mr. Azad, she drew his attention to an online article published in September in the World Health Organization (WHO) bulletin which concerns the the issue of HPV vaccine...

-The Hindu   When the World Health Organisation published its revised guidelines for malaria treatment in March 2010, just four years after it came out with its maiden version, an editorial in the BRItish Medical Journal (BMJ) was quick to highlight its significance. It was a “testament of how quickly malaria control” had developed and a “marked reduction in the global burden of malaria” had been achieved. A WHO report now confirms...

Herding cattle and weaving carpets, on city waste-heaps, at traffic lights, in roadside eateries, in farms and in factories, in BRIck kilns and coal mines, in brothels and in our homes, children of the poor work at an age when our own are in school or at play. What is remarkable is not just our collective acceptance of such diverging destinies of children merely because of the accident of where they...