It could take you as long as two years to get a date for a simple MRI scan in the country's premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) while a CAT scan has a waiting period of more than four months. Patients requiring a total hip replacement or a total knee replacement, will wait for no less than 5 months. A waiting list - ranging from 2 months to...

India is finally ready with a comprehensive Bill that will protect children from sexual abuse. But the Bill, says author-activist Pinki Virani, has a major flaw regarding sexual consent that needs to be immediately addressed and the stakeholders consulted before it becomes law. With a certain Standing Committee so much in the news, let us look at what is happening with another Standing Committee looking into a Bill to protect children...

The Planning Commission's laughable estimates of the ‘poverty line' follow from a mistake in method that it made 30 years ago and has clung to ever since. The affidavit that the Planning Commission recently submitted before the Supreme Court stating that a person is to be considered ‘poor' only if his or her monthly spending is below Rs.781 (Rs.26 a day) in the rural areas and Rs.965 (Rs.32 a day) in...

The multinational refuses to be sensitive to the grievances of its Indian workforce, which generates the greater proportion of the company's profits. The workers of the Maruti Suzuki India Limited's (MSIL) plant in Haryana's Manesar have been agitating since August-end against the dismissal and suspension of more than 60 of their colleagues and the management's insistence on their signing a ‘good conduct bond' before they are allowed to enter the plant....

The acronym LPG has several expansions. It stands for liquefied petroleum gas. It stands for liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, a term of abuse used by those with Leftwing persuasions. It stands for life plundered by the government, sentiments associated with those who are against state intervention, but increasingly felt by the so-called middle class - however defined - because of price hikes, and proposed price hikes, for petroleum products. Ostensibly, price...