'We want to pressure the government and assert our rights as citizens.' Arvind Kejriwal received the Magsaysay award in the Emergent leadership category in 2006. A mere five years later, he has far surpassed that milestone, winning acclaim and notice for the way he conceived and crafted Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement. He talks to Vidya Subrahmaniam about the Jan Lokpal campaign, what it accomplished and why it often became controversial. The scale...

India’s new vaccination policy stresses increased domestic research and surveillance on local diseases; but has drawn criticism for endorsing new vaccines in the national immunisation programme without ascertaining need. The April 2011 policy, made public by India’s ministry of health and family welfare in August, provides guidelines for vaccine research and development; strengthening the evidence base for new vaccine introduction and regulation and patent issues. It highlights lack of indigenous baseline surveillance...

-PTI   A Parliamentary standing committee has found discrepancies in MGNREGA wage distribution system and feels that reported number of corruption cases related to it is a just tip of the iceberg. “The number of corruption cases as reported is just a tip of the iceberg and the real situation in this regard may be more serious,” the committee said in its report on wage disbursement to labourers under MGNREGA by Post Offices...

-IANS   From collecting mounds of garbage, removing slush caused by rains to cleaning toilets, a group of volunteers, mostly students from premier medical and engineering colleges, kept Ramlila Maidan, the nerve centre of Anna Hazare's movement, clean at a time when it saw unprecedented footfall on all the 13 days of his fast. Initially, most of these students came to lend support to Anna Hazare's movement against corruption, but swayed by the...

-The Indian Express   The controversial compact disc containing purported conversations between noted lawyer Shanti Bhushan and political leaders Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh “is not not doctored or tampered with”, the Delhi police told a court here. The Special Cell of Delhi Police has said the opinions of Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), New Delhi and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) suggest there was no editing or tampering...