-The Hindu ‘Safe Travels!’ we wish those travelling to distant places. It is an unhappy situation that in India, we need to wish many a woman ‘safe travels’ as she steps out to work. Well publicised instances of violence against women working in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector during workplace-related travel as well as some not so broadly-known experiences of women in blue collar work, point to a problem that...

-Economic and Political Weekly India needs to find an optimal patenting regime that will safeguard incentives for innovation while simultaneously ensuring that medicines are available at reasonable prices. Viswanath Pingali (viswanath@iimahd.ernet.in) is at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Chirantan Chatterjee (chirantan@gmail.com) is at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. We gratefully acknowledge several discussions with Kensuke Kubo. Please click here to access the article. ...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A joint study by Indian and Pakistani doctors has detected abnormally high blood sugar levels in six out of 10 adults in cities, indicating a "frighteningly" higher prevalence of diabetes or its precursor, pre-diabetes, than observed before. The doctors, who screened 13,720 people aged over 20 in Chennai, Delhi and Karachi, have warned that the high incidence of pre-diabetes suggests millions more urban South Asians are likely to...

-The Times of India India and her neighbors are going through a tortuous process of urbanization - slow, messy and partly hidden. This is seen in severe problems of livability and congestion, making cities unattractive for rural migrants. As a result, whatever benefits urban agglomerations could have offered in terms of economic advance are getting diluted. This is the dire analysis of a 200-page World Bank report on urbanization in South...

-The Hoot The media coverage of the Census data on religion focused on the timing of its release and the politically controversial aspects. Many deeper and more complex layers were totally ignored. VIKAS KUMAR analyses the coverage in painstaking detail to see why journalists handledthe data so superficially Census data on religion collected in February-March 2011 was belatedly released on August 25, 2015. This analysis of how the media covered the release and...