-Hindustan Times It took nearly 15 years for India's Right to Information Act (RTI) to finally become a law in 2005 after the late VP Singh (who was India's prime minister briefly) first stressed the importance of a law that would give citizens the right to seek and get information. But now that landmark act could become toothless in far less time than that. If that happens, it will be a...

-Economic and Political Weekly Unlimited growth for prosperity in a fi nite planet is not possible. Ecological economists like Tim Jackson, Peter Victor, and others talk about prosperity without growth and highlight the need for greening the economy on a community scale. Using the "criteria of green economy enterprise" set by Jackson and Victor as a tool, this article looks at khadi production, India's community-level cloth production system. Sumanas Koulagi (k.sumanas@yahoo.in) is...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today directed all government and private hospitals to provide not only first-aid, but also follow-up treatment, free to acid-attack victims. The court said states and Union territories could take action under Section 357C of CrPC against private hospitals and clinics for refusal to treat such victims. This section says: "All hospitals, public or private, whether run by the central government, the state government, local bodies or...

-DNA Broken promises apart, a regular income for farmers is extremely essential There is trouble on the farm front. With untimely rains accompanied by hailstorms and strong winds showing no signs of relenting, further deepening the prevailing agrarian crisis; and with the spate of farmer suicides on the rise, agriculture faces its worst-ever crisis. While the rising number of farmer suicides is only a reflection of how fragile the agrarian economy...

-The Asian Age The much-quoted sentence, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics", was attributed to the 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli by American author Mark Twain. Although researchers could never find such a statement in any written work of Disraeli, the sentence gained universal popularity to signify how economists and other number-crunchers use the "persuasive power" of figures to make a political point or...