Dozens of countries are taking part in a United Nations-sponsored effort to protect potentially life-saving centuries-old traditional medicines from bio-piracy by learning from India how to halt their misappropriation through international patents granted on non-original innovations. Representatives from more than 35 countries wrapped up a three-day meeting in New Delhi today that discussed emulating India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a database documenting traditional medicinal treatment, concluding that such a mechanism...

Why don’t we see more Indian language content on the internet? For instance, there are over 200 odd million people who can read and write in Hindi. But Hindi doesn’t figure in any listing of the top ten Languages used on the internet globally. Japanese, a cussedly difficult language to read or write, makes it to the top five. This, from a country with less than one-tenth the population of India. It...

In yet another step towards modernising India's postal services, Union Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday launched ‘e-post office,' the e-commerce portal of India Post that will provide various postal services online. ‘Transact anytime' “Earlier, consumers used to go to service providers but now services providers are going to consumers… this is the future of the 21st century. The portal will enable customers to transact postal business anytime and...

The tribals have expressed their gratitude to the state government for registering Sarna religion in the census format. The move came following the directive from state census director Nitin Madan Kulkarni to the state officials asking them to allow the tribals mention Sarna as their religion in the religion code of the census format. "We are happy at the gesture shown by the state government in letting the tribals mention...

C.Chandramouli, registrar general and census commissoner of India, is on the threshold of one of the most challenging months of his career. As the head of an army of 2.7 million enumerators who will fan out for almost a month beginning 9 February, Chandramouli talked to Mint about the methods and controversies of the second phase of India’s 15th census exercise. Edited excerpts: The National Population Register (NPR) seems to be...