-The Indian Express   After a week of parliamentary gridlock over retail reform, it appears as though both government and opposition are getting too used to this state of stalemate, the squandering of precious parliamentary time over one thing or the other. The constant adjournments, disruptions and boycotts over the last three sessions have, by now, seriously undermined Parliament — blocking important legislation, putting showy partisanship above the nation’s real needs. Is the...

Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s ambitious new effort on land survey and consolidation could become another perilous flirtation with the hornet’s nest. Days after its unveiling at the presentation of the first annual report card of Nitish’s second term, a top minister in his cabinet sounded both alarm and caution on the land survey proposal. “Land, as the chief minister himself knows, is an extremely sensitive and volatile issue,” he told The...

The prevalence is 18 per cent in South India, says UNAIDS report India houses half of Asia's HIV patients and is way ahead of China in disease burden. It also finds a place in the list of 22 countries prioritised for preventing mother to child transmission infection, according to the latest UNAIDS report, drafted jointly with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). About 48 lakh people...

-The Telegraph   Stress strikes the pupils of a Murshidabad school every day not because of impenetrable syllabus or unsparing teachers but because they fear the Padma river can rise up and engulf them any minute. All it took for a wave of panic to crash in today was the rattle of tin cans on a truck and an exclamation from a teacher, which triggered a stampede in which 20 children were injured. The...

The first judgment in a 2002 riots case and the SIT report on the Ishrat Jahan killing go against the Gujarat government. THE verdict in a crucial and long-running case involving a massacre and the investigation report in another case, of alleged encounter killings, both delivered in November, give hope to victims of the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat that they will get justice, even if delayed. In the first case, the special...