The Supreme Court tells the government: "It's criminal to let food rot in a chronically hungry country. Give it away free to the poor." It could have added: "Have you no political sense? Have you not read Anandamath, or at least seen the movie?" And Manmohan Singh ticks it off for transgressing on policymaking — doesn't it know there's no such thing as a free lunch? He could have added:...

Last week saw the publication by BS Books of the India Health Report 2010 (henceforth referred to as IHR10), edited (and mostly written) by Ajay Mahal, Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari. For anyone interested in India’s health status, access to health care and medicines, emerging health problems, the infrastructure of health services, medical ethics, health-care financing, government programmes and regulations and key issues in health sector reform, this 138-page report...

A Vigyan Gram, or a science village, is to come up on the outskirts of Tripura's capital, complete with a museum, library, planetarium, botanical garden, bird sanctuary and other attractions to popularise science among the masses. The Vigyan Gram, to be modelled on the lines of science cities in various cities in India, would be set up at a cost of Rs.35 crore in western Tripura's Badharghat, a village on the...

Governments in India — Centre and states — spend around one per cent of the country's GDP on health. Only five countries — Burundi, Myanmar, Pakistan , Sudan and Cambodia — have a lower figure than this. But private spending on the crucial sector is 4.2 per cent of GDP, among the top 20 countries in the world. Within this private spend, employers pay for about 9 per cent and...

CELIA ORBOC, a cake-seller in the Philippines, spent her little stipend on a wooden shack, giving her five children a roof over their heads for the first time. In Kyrgyzstan Sharmant Oktomanova spent hers buying flour to feed six children. In Haiti President René Préval praises a dairy co-operative that gives mothers milk and yogurt when their children go to school. These are examples of the world’s favourite new anti-poverty device,...