-Frontline Members of denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, treated as criminal tribes by the colonial rulers, have no place to call their own and no land, no rights, and no support from the government.  Emaciated, eyes sunken deep into sockets, skin hanging loose, almost gasping for breath, Indro Devi and Sarvnath, a couple in their eighties, lie on polythene sheets in an 8×10 square-foot tent made of rags, by a stinking nullah...

Between 2009 and February 2011, at least 14 people were charged with sedition in India London: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013. In late August the government’s department of telecommunications, citing the “communal tensions” around Assam, blocked more than 300 individual web addresses, including the Twitter profile pages of some journalists. It also ordered a limit...

-IPS News World Water Week recently concluded in Stockholm with a special emphasis on the linkages between water and food security. From the worst drought in 56 years in the United States Midwest, to the Karnataka’s drought in India, to the protracted drought in the Sahel region of West Africa, we have also seen how in our globalised world the nexus between lack of water and food security in one corner of...

-Live Mint Cipla Ltd won a landmark patent case against Swiss drug maker F Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd in the Delhi high court on Friday over the Indian company’s generic copy of lung cancer drug Tarceva after a four-year court battle. Justice Manmohan Singh observed in his 280-page judgement that it had been scientifically proven that Cipla’s generic version was a polymorph B variant of Roche’s patented drug and that it didn’t actually...

-The Hindu Tuberculosis (TB) has remained a major infectious disease in developing and poor countries despite all efforts from health agencies to manage and control it. In fact, even an easy and effective way to diagnose the disease has remained a challenge. Emergence of drug resistant strains has made its management more complex. The steps It makes the situation in countries like India, with the highest TB burden in the world, even more...