Women in India face discrimination even when it comes to their heart health.  Three separate studies - one of them from India and the other two from China and West Asia - presented at the World Congress of Cardiology in Dubai on Friday said that women don't receive the same treatment as men for heart disease across the world.  They said that women with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) receive inferior or less...

Aamra ekhon-o boli ni kon kagoj porte hobe, kintu agami dine kintu setao bole debo. (Till now, we haven’t told which newspapers must be read, but in the future, we will do that as well.) – West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, speaking on March 29 in defense of her government’s decision to bar all but 13 newspapers from more than 2,400 government-approved libraries across the state. “Kunal Ghosh, associate editor...

-The Telegraph The Union urban development ministry has proposed three new taxes on private vehicle owners: on vehicle purchases, petrol and insurance. The aim is to fund public transport in cities and deter the use of private vehicles The Rs 40,000 crore that the ministry proposes to raise annually through the “green surcharge”, “green cess” and “urban transport tax” is to go to a national urban transport fund that will finance transport schemes. Urban...

The debate over the poverty numbers in India is oddly impoverished. Judging from the vociferousness with which India’s press and English-speaking upper-middle-classes are debating the latest poverty figures, those who chide the wealthy for a lack of concern for the poor are barking up the wrong tree. And no doubt much of the breast-beating about the “absurd” poverty cutoffs and the declines in poverty (exaggerated! inadequate!) is extremely well-intentioned. Unfortunately, the...

-Reuters   Cheap generic drugs were meant to change the life of Nandakhu Nissar, whose mouth is swollen by a cancerous tumour. But the cashless and hungry 55-year-old sleeps on a pavement staring up at the windows of Mumbai's biggest cancer hospital.  "What is a generic drug?" shrugs Nissar, who has travelled over 1,500 kms (900 miles) from his home in the hope of treatment. "I have borrowed money from friends and relatives...