Between democracy and darkness stands the judiciary. It stands heads and shoulders above the judicial systems in Asia. But it is in rapid decline. Ahead is pitch darkness Colin Gonsalves Delhi In the 61st year of the republic, surely, India has transited into Kalyug. Surveys of the Union of India as well as expert reports published by the Arjun Sengupta committee and the NC Saxena Committee appointed by the Central government...

The poverty line that the Tendulkar Committee proposes depends on reduced calorie consumption, and fails to provide for reasonable household expenditures on schooling and health.  For some years, the Government of India has been under pressure to change the norms for calculating the official poverty line. Current norms have resulted in gross and manifest underestimation of the numbers of the poor, and, consequently, in the exclusion of hundreds of millions...

Bihar has been in the news recently for recording an average growth rate of 11.3 per cent for the period between 2004 and 2009. Much has been written about the quality of governance and the improved state of roads. This is indeed commendable, and no mean achievement, for a State that had virtually become a “development outcast”. I was pleasantly surprised to note on a recent trip to Bihar the...

A United Nations report titled The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples says the indigenous people and tribes worldwide are facing extinction and exploitation due to threats of displacement and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources. It takes note of the displacement of thousands of families of the Santhal Adivasis in the Indian State of Jharkhand as a result of extraction of minerals, without proper compensation or economic security. The...

A state government scheme to pay for hospital treatment of the poor has led to an organ racket, with many private hospitals duping illiterate young women and removing their uterus for illegal sale, a minister has acknowledged. Altogether 21,000 hysterectomies (uterus removals) have been done across Andhra Pradesh under the Rajiv Arogyasree health insurance scheme since it was launched in 2007 for below-poverty-line (BPL) families, a health directorate probe has shown. Most...