-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's health ministry will tomorrow release the country's first-ever rulebook on tuberculosis that medical experts hope will help curb wrong treatment in the private sector and improve results in public-sector clinics. The Standards for TB Care in India (STCI) prescribe ways to diagnose and treat the disease, a bacterial infection that requires multiple drugs to be administered for at least six months - and up to two years...

-Tehelka If a house can be insured against natural disaster, why can't a crop field? There is nothing more gruesome for any farmer than to see before his own eyes his lush green standing crop flattened by the vagaries of nature. All his hopes and aspirations from a bountiful harvest are grounded in a matter of few minutes. Not only the crop, but his life too is flattened. As many as 24...

-The Hindu Computers are dumped in a corner, with no repairs or instructors: principal Hyderabad: Thousands of students in government-managed schools in the city continue to be deprived of computer education. The reason: computers remain mere show pieces at these institutions for want of minor repairs and lack of instructors. All this when many private schools, including unrecognised ones, are alluring students by offering free computer studies, a fact that officials themselves admit. The...

-Live Mint   Rights laws offer an important lesson for the new government: you cannot legislate your way out of state failure It is well known that the Indian state suffers from a serious crisis of implementation capability. So deep is this crisis that it cannot even reliably perform the most routine tasks like moving money and getting employees to show up at work. So, it is hardly surprising that rights laws have...

-The Hindustan Times Rubina appears much older than the 40 years she admits to. She does not look you in the eye; she is hardly audible, and often trembles. Her hut, on the outskirts of Guhana village in Haryana's Mewat district, is surrounded by garbage heaps and excreta. There is no water or electricity and the hut is filled with acrid smoke from the cooking fire. "This is how our stories...