-The Business Standard Moving forward on sanitation will require big ideas National shame” is how most people, including some senior government functionaries, often refer to the pervasive practice of open defecation. Yet, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), launched in 1991 with the noble objective of providing access to hygienic toilets for all by 2012, receives only scant attention from the government. The latest assessment indicates that as many as 22 states will...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has written a strong letter to President Pratibha Patil complaining against Union Law and Justice Minister Salman Khursheed for challenging the Commission on the “nine per cent sub-quota for minorities issue” even after being censured by it. Mr. Quraishi sought her “immediate and decisive” intervention to ensure that the Election Commission (EC) discharged its functions and duties in accordance with the Constitution and law in Uttar...

-The Telegraph After doctors, teachers from urban areas will now have to serve in rural areas of Assam. Announcing that the process of recruitment of 40, 800 schoolteachers would begin from February 15, education minister Himanta Biswa Sarma today said candidates from urban areas would have to serve in rural areas, as villages have more vacancies while more urban candidates passed the teacher’s eligibility test this year. Dispur has made teacher eligibility test...

The government is considering to make changes in existing laws to abolish all forms of child labour under 18 years.  A government panel has recommended amendment to Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act that makes distinction between hazardous and non-hazardous categories of work for children under 14 years.  Child rights activists has been demanding for a revision in the definition of child labour to bring uniformity in all laws, and recognize all...