Reluctance to make reports public could erode public confidence in government’s decisions, says CIC The Central Information Commission (CIC) has directed India’s nuclear power plant operator to publicize safety analysis reports of the Kudankulam atomic power plant within a month. In a contentious two-year dispute between environmentalists and the nuclear power establishment, the apex information commission, in an order on its website, has said that the reluctance to make the reports public...

-Reuters Rome: Governments are failing to fund projects to improve access to toilets and other sanitation services in poor countries because the subject remains "taboo", a director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said on Monday. "Who wants to talk about shit?" asked Frank Rijsberman, Director of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at the $ 34 billion charitable foundation, during an interview with Reuters on Monday. "It's the last big taboo and as...

When India embarked on its “unique ID” project in the fall of 2010, pledging to distribute unique 12-digit numbers to 1.2 billion people, the hope was that hundreds of millions of Indians who don’t have a passport, driver’s license or other credible identity document would get one – and with it, a ticket to essential government and private sector services. A new survey led by Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New...

Ignoring widespread concern over the safety, efficacy and cost of pentavalent vaccines, India’s central health ministry has, this month, approved inclusion of the prophylactic cocktail in the universal immunisation programme in seven of its provinces. Pentavalent vaccine doses, a cocktail of five antigens in a single shot, confers immunity against five paediatric diseases - diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B and haemophilus influenza type b (Hib), with the last one considered particularly...

In 2005, when the Labour Party decided to implement the National Identity Project (NIP) in the UK, it drew severe criticism from many quarters, including the Tories, who later scrapped the NIP after coming to power. A report by the London School of Economics (LSE), which stated the project is “unsafe in law” and should be regarded as a “potential danger to public interest”, was instrumental in buttressing the arguments...