-The Economist   Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

SHEILA DEVI, 54, of Nangal Kalan village in Haryana’s Sonepat district cannot comprehend how Taneja Developers and Infrastructure Ltd (TDI) procured her two-acre plot in 2004, ‘signed’ with thumb impressions of her husband Narender Singh, who died in 2002 and his brother Bhupender, who went missing the next year. The documents are obviously forged. But how did a farmers’ family get cheated in Haryana, where the land acquisition policy formed in...

The tribals in the Maoist-affected districts, including Mirzapur, Chandauli and Sonbhadra of East Uttar Pradesh, seem to have been born with a burden -- poverty. With almost all the major political parties promising special packages for various regions of the state to garner votes, the situation for those living below poverty line in the region is as desperate as was a couple of decades back. Take for example Katwaru, a member...

-ANI Humanity, harmony, good governance are ideals a democratic nation aspires to. As the world's largest democracy, India is no exception. Her lawmakers and administrators, often the brightest of her citizens, vow to serve the people and govern them with integrity. These lofty ideals, hever, hold no ground in the face of the harsh pressures of conflict, now spreading rapidly across the country. I searched for and interviewed every single individual of a...