India's efforts to produce and supply life-saving drugs at affordable prices face challenges from multinational companies trying to “evergreen” their patents. THE average life expectancy across the globe has increased from around 30 years a century ago to over 65 years today. This has been made possible in large part by modern medicine. Never before in history have humans had access to such an array of medicines and devices to...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Rajya Sabha to consider repealing Kapil Sibal’s IT Rules-Shivam Vij
-Kafila.org When the Parliament’s budget session re-opens on April 24, the Rajya Sabha will vote on an annulment motion against the IT Rules promulgated in April 2011 that provide for “intermediaries” to remove the online content they are asked to by anyone. The motion has been moved by P Rajeeve, Rajya Sabha member from the Communist Party of India-Marxist. Speaking on the phone from Thrissur, Rajeeve said, “The IT Rules go against...
More »Think outside the 25% box-Vikas Maniar
RTE implementation must focus on improving standards in government schools The provision for reserving 25 per cent seats in Class I for private unaided schools in the Right to Education Act is a red herring. About 30 per cent of the 76 lakh primary school children in Karnataka go to unaided private schools, mostly in urban areas, according to District Information System for Education (DISE) data. A 25 per cent reservation...
More »Classroom struggle-Pratap Bhanu Mehta
Court settles the class issue, but the real challenges of RTE have to be met The debate over the Right to Education is beginning to display characteristic symptoms of Indian debates. Elites are inventing specious arguments to condone the economic apartheid in the current system. But India’s self-appointed anti-elites are often even more elitist. They are more fixated on taking down elites a peg or two rather than intelligently fixing real...
More »The spectre of FIR raj
-The Telegraph The manner in which a professor and a retired engineer were arrested and locked up for over 16 hours in Calcutta has blown the lid off a tactic increasingly being employed in Bengal to intimidate or settle scores with dissenters. The weapon of mass-scale harassment is an oft-mentioned but little-understood piece of paper called the FIR or first information report. The method is scary — a word that cropped up several...
More »