-Down to Earth   Punjab has been in the grip of cancer for over a decade but the government has ignored the threat.  It all started with a knot in her left breast. Within no time it grew to the size of a tennis ball. In pain, 40-year-old Raj Rani went to the doctor in her village in Punjab’s Ferozepur district. Finding no relief, she started doing the rounds of government hospitals in...

-The Hindu House-hunting for a Muslim in Delhi can be a long and excruciating exercise….  I shudder even now when I think of the incident of my husband, a media relations executive, being called a terrorist. Five years ago, in Dwarka’s Sabka Ghar Apartments here in the Capital, we were not able to get our favourite news channels on cable TV. My husband had been calling the cablewallah without much success. One day...

The only RTI activist appointed in the Central Information Commission as an Information Commissioner, Shailesh Gandhi has set the bar high for the other Commissioners by clearing nearly 20,000 cases in four years. On Friday, July 6, as he demitted office at the end of his term, he spoke to Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar about how to improve the delivery of information through the Right to Information Act. Excerpts. How do you...

-The Telegraph A day after land protests rocked Nagri, work at the construction site of three premier educational institutions stalled on Thursday even as villagers demanding “return” of their fertile land blocked the arterial Ranchi-Patratu road a kilometre away, disrupting Hazaribagh-bound traffic from the capital throughout the day. A 100-strong mob, comprising mostly women, used a crane belonging to a contractor, to block the vital artery from 9am. Even heavy rain failed...

-Reuters A shortfall in monsoon rains has widened to nearly 50 percent of average in the past week, making a revival next week crucial for farmers to sow summer-planted crops such as rice, corn, cane, cotton and soybean. The annual rains are crucial for farm output and economic growth as about 55 percent of the South Asian nation's arable land is rain-fed. Farm sector accounts for about 15 percent of a nearly $2-trillion...