But will it reflect true level of poverty in the country? India's poverty line has hit the headlines again. In the past six months this is for the second time that the government has tried to bring out a poverty line. Like the poverty line in September last year, the new poverty line has also triggered widespread Dissent and debate. In an action replay, this time also the government almost junked...

When I hear the word “NGO”, the image evoked in my mind is that of my mother setting us homework to do on a Saturday morning and going off with her friends to teach knitting and sewing to indigent young girls in our hometown, Kannur, in the Malabar area of Kerala. My mother and her friends – wives of doctors, lawyers, government officials and prominent businessmen – had committed their...

-The Telegraph A group of eminent individuals has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking him to initiate a “truly inclusive process of deliberation” to help formulate a rational public policy on nuclear power and genetically modified (GM) crops. Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, a former Supreme Court judge, and 16 others, including former scientists and administrators, have also questioned Singh’s remarks to a US journal last month suggesting that foreign non-government organisations...

Taking strong exception to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's remarks against NGOs who opposed genetically modified crops and nuclear power plants, a group of eminent citizens said that it was a “highly inappropriate misrepresentation of facts.” In a strongly-worded letter to him, the group led by the former Supreme Court Judge, V.R. Krishna Iyer, and including the former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, A. Gopalakrishnan, said it was the government...

In the context of the suicide by a reserved category first year student at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on March 3, a recent decision of the Institute Body (IB) and the Governing Body (GB) points, on the one hand, to total insensitivity of the institute's administration to the problems of the SCs/STs, and, on the other, how politician-members of these apex bodies seem to influence the decisions...