Meena Kandasamy, one of Chennai’s well-known activists and poets, was recently in Hyderabad delivering a few lectures at NALSAR and other institutions about Ambedkar, when she heard about a beef festival at Osmania University being organised by the Telengana Students’ Association and the Progressive Students Union. Several students and teachers had gathered to support the event organised by the dalit students and also as a symbol of admonishing cultural oppression from...

-PTI Government came under attack in the Lok Sabha today on the issue of price rise with the Left parties demanding that an all-party meeting as also a conference of Chief Ministers be convened soon to take concrete steps to check the price line.  Raising the issue during Zero Hour, CPI(M) leader Basudeb Acharia accused the government of "total failure" in reining prices despite several assurances from the Prime Minister and the...

-The Telegraph   The New York Times has reported that Wal-Mart, the US-based retail giant, hushed up an internal investigation sometime after the company was told of a bribery campaign to obtain licences and facilitate rapid expansion in Mexico. Some of the alleged instances of bribery are certain to ring a bell in India where it is not too difficult to bend rules for a price. The New York Times said its “examination...

What better elixir than pure water? Thanks to Naandi, a safe drinking water programme, 3,90,536 households in rural areas across four Indian states are benefited.  Naandi, headquartered in Hyderabad, is a not-for-profit organization which works with governing bodies in rural areas, including Karnataka, to provide clean drinking water to the poor. So what really is their modus operandi? It is essentially a community-run programme where the local governing body or gram...

That this is the first time a compulsory licence has been granted in India is in itself important. INDIA'S long struggle to ensure access to affordable medicines for its people recently took a positive and interesting turn. In early March, just before he demitted office, Controller General of Patents P.H. Kurian passed an order on an application filed by Natco Pharma, headquartered in Hyderabad, requesting a licence to produce an anti-cancer...