Has civil society gone beyond its remit by refusing to back down on the issue of tackling corruption? The answer to that depends on which side of the on-going debate on the Lokpal Bill you are on. If you are with the civil society activists, then the question just does not arise. For too long has the government dragged its feet on the Lokpal Bill and civil society is entirely...
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India's Rural Poor Give up on Power Grid, Go Solar by Katy Daigle
Boommi Gowda used to fear the night. Her vision fogged by glaucoma, she could not see by just the dim glow of a kerosene lamp, so she avoided going outside where king cobras slithered freely and tigers carried off neighborhood dogs. But things have changed at Gowda's home in the remote southern village of Nada. A solar-powered lamp pours white light across the front of the mud-walled hut she shares with...
More »Rx Negative, Genetically by Pragya Singh
People who play doctor or heed quackery are biting off more than they can chew Whenever a patient with bleeding in the stomach or a child whose fever has not subsided in a week is admitted into Sasaram-based physician B.B. Singh’s clinic, he immediately knows that it’s a case of self-medication. “At least 40-50 per cent of my patients have either had sleeping pills, or antibiotics, or painkillers without a...
More »Funding, the key by Jayati Ghosh
It is essential for India to raise the level of public expenditure in education to ensure quality. THE failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country....
More »Reverse exemption
-The Deccan Herald "CBI can’t be equated with other agencies." The Union cabinet’s recent decision to exclude the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) from the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act is wrong and, as widely suspected, ill-motivated. The CBI has been trying to secure such an exemption for long for wrong reasons. The cabinet has acted according to the wishes of the investigative agency and notified its decision. The...
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