BANWARA, India – In the fall of 2006, Gita Devi was pregnant with her sixth child when her family fell on hard times. A severe drought made it more difficult than ever to find farm work here in India’s northeastern plains. The family couldn’t afford food. It was unable to get a government ration card to buy grains and rice at steep discounts, even though it clearly was poor enough to...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Starving in India: Legislating Food Security-Ashwin Parulkar
Over the past week, I’ve chronicled my investigative research on starvation in India – a project I’ve been working on with a colleague from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. We’ve told stories of people who were forced to eat poisoned roots to stay alive; a family that suffered the deaths of members from three different generations in a span of 24 hours; a woman faced with...
More »SC: Implement reclamation, rehabilitation plans for mines-J Venkatesan
The Supreme Court on Friday accepted the report of the Central Empowered Committee and directed the implementation of reclamation and rehabilitation plans for all three categories of mines in the districts of Bellary, Chitradurga and Tumkur in Karnataka. Implementing plans A three-judge Bench of Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia, Justice Aftab Alam and Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan said that the R and R plans should start immediately. The Bench said: “It is made clear...
More »The flip side of fighting graft-Andre Beteille
The attack on corruption should not turn into disregard and contempt for institutions. The educated middle class in India is naturally exercised over the corruption that is widely prevalent in public life. With growing concern over corruption there is growing indignation. This indignation is expressed on various public occasions, sometimes passionately, but often in a purely routine manner. Every public institution and every public office, civil as well as military, is...
More »UN calls attention to rising number of dementia cases, urges early detection
-The United Nations The number of people with dementia is projected to double to 65.7 million by 2030, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) said today, noting that lack of diagnosis remains a major problem even in high-income countries, where only a fifth to half of cases are routinely recognized. Treating and caring for the estimated 35.6 million with dementia at present costs the world more than $604 billion per year,...
More »