The “paid news syndrome” in the media should be resisted as part of a larger struggle for democratic rights because corruption in the media directly affects the health of democracy. The struggle has to be waged in the context of media's corporatisation, monopolistic trends and structural decline. These views emerged at a day-long seminar on “Abridging Freedom and Fairness of the Media: Combating Challenges,” organised by the Rajasthan Working Journalists' Union,...

The city is teeming with guests. They are migrant workers from neighbouring states who are in the city for work, for better income, for better living conditions and for everything else that makes the city attractive. They are mostly employed in the unorganised sector, as vendors, contract workers at construction sites, rickshaw-pullers or domestic workers. The city does not seem to care for them. They stumble around learning the ways of...

Chief Minister V. S. Achuthanandan will convene a conference of officials on November 18 to review relief measures undertaken by the government for victims of Endosulfan in Kasaragod district. The conference will review the effectiveness of assistance provided by government to the victims. Besides welfare pensions for the disabled, the government is providing monthly assistance for bystanders of bed-ridden victims, rice at Rs.2 a kg and medical assistance. The meet may also look...

The latest Human Development Report, or HDR, (2010), marking its 20th anniversary, is both remarkable and useful. Remarkable because it brims with intellectual confidence, born out of a sense of vindication over the “conceptual brilliance and continued relevance” of Mahbub ul-Huq’s original human development paradigm set out in the first sentence of the 1990 report — “People are the real wealth of nations.” The idea of human development, which, through...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...