Regulations covering public health should override personal rights and the country cannot wait any more for a good public health law. The health care industry, including institutions of medical education, hospitals and pharmaceutical businesses, have grown into behemoths that can do considerable harm in the absence of independent and effective regulatory systems. While there are no success stories in the regulation of any kind of industry in India, I will focus...

The apex decision-making body of the communications ministry has cleared the proposal to grant more powers to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and enable the watchdog to act like a civil court.  This puts TRAI on par with the Securities and Exchange Board of India and the Competition Commission of India and permits the telecom regulator to 'summon persons, examine them on oath, demand documents and evidence on affidavits...

The power of judicial review envelopes natural resource distribution The tsunami created by the 2G spectrum judgments of the the Supreme Court last week has almost mopped up the ripples they made in the legal sphere. However, they deserve respectful consideration for their discussion on two hot issues that have been agitating public mind in recent years. The first is the nature and ownership of natural resources, like air waves and spectrum,...

-The Hindustan Times By cancelling licences issued by the UPA government to telecommunications companies in 2008, the Supreme Court has ruled against discretion in the allotment of natural resources like radio Frequencies. This is in contrast to the view of this government and that of its predecessor, the NDA, that big upfront costs like spectrum fees, which must be passed on to customers, don’t serve the larger goal of universal telecom...

Currently, there are more than 50 crore cell phone users and nearly 4.4 lakh cell phone towers to meet the communication demand in the country. And the numbers of cell phones and cell towers are increasing each day without a careful study of major health risks due to radiation from cell phone and cell tower. IIT professor Girish Kumar, who has documented a detailed analysis of disadvantages of cell phone technology in...