While human rights activists across the world express their shock and outrage at Binayak Sen's life imprisonment sentence, one of the biggest blows will be felt by his alma mater, Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore. Until the verdict, the gentle doctor was busy, among other things, with a new project which could usher in a new light for Healthcare education in India. Following the Social Determinants of Health report of...

The world's growing riches seem to make little difference to over 100 million people globally as they slide into poverty every year because of Healthcare costs. One of the unsolved conundrums in many countries is the inability to provide for universal Healthcare coverage, despite economic growth and development. While the financial consequences of illness are severe for many in poorer countries that do not have appropriate systems in place, those...

The historian Ramachandra Guha has famously described India as a fifty-fifty democracy. But even admirers of India as a functioning democracy will perhaps be forced to admit that certain events in 2010 forced the needle to move beyond fifty against democracy. Threats to democracy and democratic rights have never been as evident, and as powerful, since the dark days of the Emergency in 1975-76 as they were in the course...

Mai-baap. That is how poor Indians referred to the state ever since independence. The benign provider looking after its subjects like the rajas of yore. But, today, the people have started demanding accountability from the mai-baap. Why? Because a clutch of new laws, like the Right To Information Act (RTI) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), are moving the government's developmental promises beyond "the realm of a privilege that...

“Take again Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code. Now so far as I am concerned that particular section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place both for practical and historical reasons, if you like, in anv body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.” —Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in Parliament during debates on the first amendment to...