-PTI The Centre on Tuesday made a strong plea before the Supreme Court for passing an appropriate order to ban all kinds of gutka in the country saying they are addictive and harmful even if they don't contain tobacco. Appearing before a bench headed by Justice GS Singhvi, Additional Solicitor General Indira Jaising made a forceful submission against manufacturing and selling of gutka products. Senior advocate Gopal Subramaniam, who is assisting the...

-Down to Earth If any other cause was responsible for so many deaths and injuries as we see on our roads it would have been a state of emergency Sunita Narain-our colleague and friend-was seriously injured in an accident while cycling yesterday. A car hit her and fled. This cruel act of crime and heartlessness could have shattered our faith in humanity had it not been for the kind act of the...

-Newsclick.in Recent studies have shown that even as India fares better than many developing regions of the world on several indicators of growth and development such as GDP, per capita, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), literacy, life expectancy, etc., the number of malnourished children in India is significantly high. What explains this paradox? The Union Cabinet recently approved a multi-sectoral nutritional programme proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to reduce...

-The Hindu Bangalore: The foot-and-mouth DISEase appears only to be spreading geographically and in intensity across the State, even as the Animal Husbandry Department reiterates that the cattle DISEase is "under control". By Wednesday, the DISEase had claimed 3,060 head of cattle (since September 1), according to official figures with the department, a significant jump from last week's casualty figure of 2,060. Another 23,500 animals have been infected with the virus, as...

-The Hindu In addition to ailments caused by poverty, salt pan workers across the country suffer from several occupational DISEases, including chronic dermatitis, loss of vision and hypothyroidism In Adivasi Colony, a remote hamlet off the road from Vedaranyam to Kodikarai in Tamil Nadu, most of the adults in the 200-odd households work in salt manufacturing. They prepare salt pans manually, irrigate them with saline water which is three times saltier than...