-The Hindu The huge deficit in blood availability outside urban centres must jolt the government into legalising unbanked blood supply Twenty-year-old Putul, living in a village 70 km from a district headquarters town in Chhattisgarh, had been in labour for two days and a night. It was her first pregnancy. In order to hasten labour, the local quack administered several injections that increased her uterine contractions. Forty hours after the onset of...

-The Hindu It is premature to speak of a ‘new Bihar' based on the experience of a compressed time-frame Rekindling Governance and Development: Edited by N. K. Singh, Nicholas Stern; HarperCollins Publishers, A-53, Sector 57, Noida-201301. Rs. 699. The editors of this book have gathered a panel of stellar luminaries to valorise their notion of ‘The New Bihar'. Learned, laudatory essays extol the sea-change wrought by the NDA government since it came to...

-PTI NEW DELHI: An ordinance to protect convicted MPs and MLAs from facing immediate disqualification was approved on Tuesday by the Union Cabinet, in effect negating an order of the Supreme Court. Government decided to bring the ordinance after failing to get a Bill to this effect passed in Parliament during the recent monsoon session, sources said. The government's decision to take the ordinance route came against the backdrop of a Congress MP...

-The Hindu Equating juveniles with adult criminals is neither scientifically correct nor normatively defensible The August 31 verdict of the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) in the Delhi gang rape case, handing down a bare three-year custodial sentence to the juvenile member, has generated a fresh round of debate on the legality and desirability of juvenile justice itself: why should juveniles above 16 indulging in violent crimes not be treated as adult criminals?...

-The Hindu Despite deriving their power from Dalits and the marginalised, the principal parties in Uttar Pradesh have turned away from the real issues confronting these sections, says Dalit writer Kanwal Bharti on his recent arrest My recent arrest has superbly exposed the well crafted illusion of socialism as professed by the Samajwadi Party (SP). I was arrested under Sections 153 and 295 A of the Indian Penal Code for criticising the...