-The Business Standard The mid-day meal scheme cannot be blamed for the Chapra incident. It is a question of professionalising the administration and everyone doing his duty. N C Saxena, Food Commissioner appointed by the Supreme Court in the Right to Food case tells Sreelatha Menon.Edited excerpts: * Can the mid-day meal tragedy in Chapra be blamed on the decision to have separate kitchens for each school without a monitoring mechanism? The monitoring...
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When expedience trumps expertise-Ramachandra Guha
-The Hindu Uttarakhand reiterates that our rulers have contemptuous disregard for the advice of the best scientists and would rather listen to contractors and builders to whom they are beholden for funds In the early 1980s, while doing research on the environmental history of Uttarakhand, I sometimes visited the library of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun. Most of the journals in the library dealt with geology and earth sciences,...
More »New mental health bill bans electric shocks without anaesthesia, gives right to treatment
-IANS The right of mentally-ill patients to decide their mode of treatment, decriminalising suicide for them and a ban on electric shock treatment without anaesthesia are some of the progressive provisions of the new mental health bill proposed by the government. "The bill was passed by the union cabinet last week," Health Secretary K. Desiraju told IANS. Once passed by parliament, the bill will repeal the Mental Health Act, 1987. If passed, it will...
More »Rain toll rises to 131, over 73,000 pilgrims stranded
-The Times of India DEHRADUN/SHIMLA: Torrential rains continued to pour in bad news from north India on Tuesday, with flash floods, cloudbursts and landslips claiming 69 more lives and taking the official death toll to 131, making for the most tragic tidings of monsoon in recent years. More than 73,000 pilgrims bound for the Himalayan shrines of Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri remained stranded in Uttarakhand and about 1,700 tourists were...
More »More mines, fewer schools in former Maoist stronghold-Anumeha Yadav
-The Hindu Manoharpur (Jharkhand): Deep inside the Saranda sal forest, Thalkobad lies at the core of what was a CPI (Maoist) "liberated zone" in Jharkhand's West Singhbhum district along the Odisha border. Thalkobad, along with 24 other villages, was reclaimed by the Indian state after a massive military operation - Operation Anaconda-I in August 2011 to destroy the CPI (Maoist) Eastern Regional Bureau and several training camps inside Saranda. The village...
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