PROFESSOR Shamnad Basheer joined the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata, in November 2008 as the first Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor in Intellectual Property Law. Before this, he was Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University law school and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (OIPRC).  He is the founder of several initiatives, including...

-The Deccan Chronicle Kerala’s 100 per cent literacy myth has been busted. About 2.2 lakh people belonging to the scheduled castes in the state are illiterate, it has been revealed. This comes up to 9.5 per cent of the Dalit population. The figures were part of one of the main findings in the provisional data prepared by the Kerala Institute of Local Administration as part of a study on scheduled caste habitat and...

The government is planning to tighten the rules for issuing and renewing driving licences to make the process “fudge proof” after a study showed drivers’ fault accounted for most road accidents in the country. A committee of state transport commissioners and officials from the National Informatics Centre recently came up with suggestions on possible amendments to the rules. The panel, headed by Andhra Pradesh transport commissioner Hiralal Samariya, has submitted its report...

-Live Mint At a time when India plans a multi-pronged attack on malnutrition in 200 high-burden districts, it will pay to examine the cracks in state institutions that have led to past failures and can still derail well-intentioned plans. Melghat, a tribal corner in the northeastern fringes of India’s richest state—Maharashtra—is an apt example of almost everything that has gone wrong in India’s response to malnutrition and child deaths. Every 14th child dies...

-The Indian Express A new study has found that mothers born in India but living in Canada are significantly more likely to have male babies for their second and third births compared with women in Canada. Researchers from St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto conducted the study. "Our findings raise questions about why there are more male liveborns than female liveborns among Indian couples who have had two or more previous...