-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: About 115 students of a government school in Puri district were hospitalised today allegedly after consuming iron tablets that were administered as part of their midday meals. The supplementary tablets are given once every week as part of a government scheme to cure anaemia among the children. The state government has ordered a probe into the incident that took place at Gopinathpur Upper Grade Middle English School in Brahmagiri's Jadupur...

-The Hindustan Times We must thank the Supreme Court for doing what the Centre should have done in the first place: clearing the confusion on whether Aadhaar is mandatory for citizens to avail of State subsidies by ruling, on Monday, that it is not. It must be mentioned here that even though personal information of citizens is being collated by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for Aadhaar, the authority has...

-The Hindu It is premature to speak of a ‘new Bihar' based on the experience of a compressed time-frame Rekindling Governance and Development: Edited by N. K. Singh, Nicholas Stern; HarperCollins Publishers, A-53, Sector 57, Noida-201301. Rs. 699. The editors of this book have gathered a panel of stellar luminaries to valorise their notion of ‘The New Bihar'. Learned, laudatory essays extol the sea-change wrought by the NDA government since it came to...

Bihar Government's programme of distributing bicycles to school girls may be a modest intervention but is leading to big changes. A new research-based paper, brought out in August 2013, corroborates the success of the programme and testifies that it is leading to improved school enrollment of girls and arresting their dropout rates (See links below to read full paper and earlier studies on the subject).   Based on econometric and statistical models,...

-The Times of India LONDON: India is recording a whopping 5.2 million injuries each year due to medical errors and adverse events. Of these, the biggest sources are mishaps from medications, hospital-acquired infections and blood clots that develop in legs from being immobilized in the hospital. Similarly, approximately 3 million years of healthy life are lost in India each year due to these injuries. A landmark report by an Indian doctor from Harvard School...