-The Hindu In India, the right to vote is only a statutory right, but the act of voting is a constitutionally protected ‘freedom of expression' under Article 19, as a fundamental right (PUCL, 2013). The Supreme Court recently refused to hear a petition challenging the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj (Second Amendment) Ordinance, 2014 on procedural grounds, sending it back to the High Court. The controversial ordinance introduces a set of educational qualifications of...

-The Hindu The recently released draft National Health Policy 2015 highlights the "challenge" of population stabilisation in six of the 11 States. Following massive protests over the death of 13 women who underwent the sterilisation procedure of tubectomy in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh last November, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has written to all States reminding them that every person should be counselled about the different family planning options available....

-The Hindustan Times New Delhi: For a long time, 12- year-old Rohan, an HIV positive child, was in pain but could not comprehend why. For months, he passed blood with his stools. Finally, a counsellor drew a sketch after Rohan pointed to his mouth and back and the truth emerged: He was regularly being forced into oral and anal sex. Rohan then drew a picture of Ashish, one of his co-inmates at...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: Vegetables are the noble folk of food world, loved equally by doctors and grandmothers. Vegetarians live off them and meat-eaters are told to live off them. But in Delhi, under every crunchy leaf of radish or the shiny brinjal hide dangerous amounts of pesticides that can slowly kill, shows a new study by JNU. Pritha Chatterjee and Aniruddha Ghosal report how growers, consumers and the authorities may...

-Business Standard The wide disparity between the best healthcare & quackery that much of the population must endure is partly to blame for India's apathy Whether Indians in ancient times discovered algebra and the Pythagoras theorem before "selflessly" passing them on to the Arabs and the Greeks as Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan said last week is for agile historians to ponder. Widely accepted is that Indians in ancient times studied...