-Outlook Vikram Patel is professor of international mental health and founding director of the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He’s been featured in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people worldwide. He spoke to Priyadarshini Sen on the dark side of mental institutions. Excerpts: * What are your thoughts on labelling a person ‘mad’ and committing him/her to a psychiatric care facility? Well, being admitted...
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Curious case of missing RTI commissioners -Christin Mathew Philip
-The Times of India CHENNAI: The Right to Information (RTI) is turning into an increasingly opaque idea as more posts of the information commissioner are falling vacant. Vacancies for the post in the country increased from 14% in 2014 to 20% in 2015, reveals a nation-wide study conducted by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), an NGO. According to the report, the number of information commissioners in the country has been reduced from 120...
More »Towards a strategy for climate change talks -Montek S Ahluwalia
-Business Standard Nations below a level of per-capita GDP representing a peaking point could be allowed to expand total emissions The world's climate change negotiators will meet again in December in Paris. The good news is that all countries, including developing countries, have agreed to announce their "intended nationally determined contributions" (INDCs). The bad news is that they are nowhere near an agreement on action by individual countries that could limit global...
More »Krishi Vigyan Kendras in West UP floundering on resource crunch -Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-Business Standard Conceptualised to impart on- and off-field training to farmers, these bodies are failing because of poor financial and logistical support Muradnagar/ Hastinapur: For Ravinder Singh, the red and white building, just a few metres away from their 10-bigha farm is nothing more than a regular government office, where officials come and go without having any impact on their lives. Though they are aware the building has something to do with agriculture,...
More »Key choices, some questions
-The Hindu The appointments of Vijai Sharma as Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) and K.V. Chowdary as Chief Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), which have been a long time coming, also raise some concerns about the Narendra Modi government’s level of engagement with institutions that form the life breath of Indian democracy. The CIC presides over the Right to Information, crucial to a participatory democracy in making institutions accountable, while the CVC is tasked...
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