-The Telegraph The World Health Organisation has deleted India from its list of polio endemic countries, acknowledging the absence of any new instance of illness caused by the wild polio virus for more than a year since a child was diagnosed with the disease in Howrah in January 2011. “This is the first time in history we’re able to put up a map like this one,” Bruce Aylward, an assistant director-general for...

-AP The microfinance industry pursued a path of rapid business growth in recent years; two investigations now link it to debtor suicides   First they were stripped of their utensils, furniture, mobile phones, television sets, ration cards and heirloom gold jewellery. Then, some of them drank pesticide. One woman threw herself into a pond. Another jumped into a well with her children. Sometimes, the debt collectors watched nearby. More than 200 poor, debt-ridden residents of...

‘Court will not interfere in the issue except in exceptional cases' In preventive detention cases, the court cannot interfere with the subjective satisfaction reached by the detaining authority (DA) on breach of public order, except in exceptional cases and on extremely limited grounds, the Supreme Court has held. A Bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and J. Chelameswar said, “The court cannot substitute its own opinion for that of the DA when the...

-AP India has shut down three aid organizations it says were diverting foreign funds toward rallying protests against a Russian-built nuclear plant in the south, but one group on Saturday denied any involvement in the protests while another said its efforts were entirely homegrown.  Activists opposed to an expansion of India's atomic energy portfolio argue that Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster caused by a massive earthquake and tsunami last March showed that such...

The time spent by government officials replying to RTI is so little that it cannot be a pretext for them to shirk that task In August 2011, the Supreme Court made an observation which had some unintended consequences on the Right to Information (RTI) process. The judgement by Justice R.V. Raveendran is turning out to be a seemingly legitimate excuse for government officials to restrict information.  Aditya Bandopadhyay went to court when...