As agriculture universities transform local varieties into genetically modified Bt brinjal, questions of ownership arise. Indians call it the brinjal. Other countries know it as the eggplant or aubergine. It is widely used the world over and every cuisine from the Chinese to the African has an encyclopaedia of recipes that establishes its popularity as a vegetable of daily use. And no vegetable has hogged the headlines as much as the...

CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...

No matter how much we try to make up for our historic underinvestment in roads by frantically constructing flyovers and highways, India will never be truly on the move unless it addresses the dark question of injury and mortality. Road safety is a pubLIC health crisis, as the WHO has been pointing out for years. There are 13 deaths every hour on our roads, and India now has the highest...

IN the digital age, the implementation of the Right to Information Act, 2005, is deeply linked to the technology that will be adopted to store pubLIC documents and information in digital formats. Thus, the National PoLICy on Open Standards in E-Governance is critical to “ensure reliable long-term accessibility to pubLIC information”, wrote RTI activists, under the aegis of the National Campaign for People’s Rights to Information (NCPRI), in a letter...

Opening more medical colleges is not the solution to India’s chronic shortage of doctors in the rural areas.  India is the largest supplier of foreign medical graduates to the United States and the United Kingdom. Yet, its own rural areas have remained chronically deprived of professional doctors. The historical antecedents of these shortages could be traced to a landmark health poLICy document, the Bhore Committee Report of 1946. That report...