-Express News Service Three killers of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi will join families of several convicts on death row, including Devendra Pal Singh Bhullar, before the Supreme Court for commutation of their death penalty to life imprisonment owing to inordinate delay in mercy process.   Invoking its constitutional powers to Transfer any case which raises “substantial questions of general importance”, a Supreme Court Bench led by Justice G S Singhvi on Tuesday...

Panel meets Mamata, seeks an action taken report within three months The National Commission for Women (NCW) has expressed deep concern over the reported case of sexual assault on a physically challenged minor girl allegedly by a medical professional at the Bankura Medical Hospital in West Bengal. “The case is extremely distressing considering that the victim is a person of special needs and she was under the care of a doctor, who...

The National Advisory Council has asked the Centre to formulate a national policy to stem the declining sex ratio at birth that it believed was “located at the complex interface of the status of women in Indian society, patriarchal social mores and prejudice, spread and misuse of medical technology and the changing aspirations of urban and rural society”. The council’s draft recommendations — prepared by members Farah Naqvi and A.K. Shiva...

India joins global drug discovery league The launch by Ranbaxy last week of Synriam, a new drug to treat malaria, is an important milestone. Having made its name by manufacturing generic (off patent) drugs cheaply, India’s pharmaceutical industry has struggled to achieve original drug discovery since the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations signalled the onset of product patents in India. It began to be realised, in time, that there was...

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...