-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has got a reluctant railways on board for its ambitious bill seeking a blanket ban on manual scavenging. The Prohibition of Empowerment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, which was cleared last week by the cabinet, had been pending for over a year because the railways did not want to be part of it. The largest public carrier had...

-The Economic Times Over a year ago, I had written a piece, Quo Vadis, Indian Pharma? (ET, May 11, 2012), in this column. Some key issues were highlighted in the article. Perhaps it is time to revisit the subject and bring out some current issues. Price control: Hurray, the department of pharmaceuticals has come out with a new non-intrusive price control methodology, moving from the cost-based model to the average market price...

-The Times of India I grew up in Patna but the place where I learned to ride a bicycle was Chaibasa. My seventh birthday passed unnoticed because my maternal grandmother had died the previous week, but my parents relented and bought me the promised bicycle. Yesterday, I went back to Chaibasa after more than 40 years. My father was a civil servant who had served for many years in what is now...

-Feministsindia.com Sharmila Rege, an extremely popular teacher and warm fellow traveler in the women's studies movement, will always be with us through her writings on caste, gender and feminism and compassion she has shown for activists and researchers I was shocked and saddened to learn about the untimely death of Sharmila Rege, on 13 July, 2013, due to cancer of colon, at the young age of 48. Prof. Sharmila Rege was an...

-The New York Times Blog The right to food is finally becoming a lively political issue in India. Aware of the forthcoming national elections in 2014, political parties are competing to demonstrate - or at least proclaim - their commitment to food security. In a country where endemic undernutrition has been accepted for too long as natural, this is a breakthrough of sorts. The rhetoric, however, is not always matched by understanding...