The Jan Lokpal is being vested with sweeping powers, which are susceptible to misuse. The centralised structure of the Lokpal will be ill-suited for sorting out governance deficit. People will be confined to being complainants and applicants. There is need to make the Jan Lokpal people-centric FOR many who quite rightly guessed that the Lokpal Bill drafted by the government would be a non-starter, the alternative merited automatic support. However, little...

Patriarchal societies are part of the problem of altered sex ratios, female infanticide and foeticide. This needs to be acknowledged and changed. India's sex ratio, among children aged 0-6 years, is alarming. The ratio has declined from 976 females (for every 1000 males) in 1961 to 914 in 2011. Every national census has documented a decline in the ratio, signalling a ubiquitous trend. Preliminary data from the 2011 census have recorded...

Company consistently violated tenets of Cement Wage Board Award ACC says it is studying the court ruling and examining options Every evening about 500 workers shrug off the exhaustion of an eight-hour shift to protest outside the premises of ACC Ltd.'s Jamul cement factory in Durg, Chhattisgarh. Closed fists swing rhythmically to chants of “Inqilab zindabad,” as factory veterans who have been protesting for 20 years stand beside young men with little...

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act was passed in August 2009 — a momentous decision, if decades too late. Since last April, when it started functioning, the state has been required, by law, to provide a neighbourhood school that meets a minimum standard within three years. The act Mandates a whole range of measures to upgrade the number and quality of schools, like specified teacher-student ratios, making sure...

India faces the challenge of inappropriate use of antibiotics while Bharat copes with poor access to treatment, resulting in a policy conundrum and inaction. India was recently in the news for the wrong reasons. The serious threat posed by the newly discovered microbe, NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo--lactamase-1), resistant to many antibiotics, triggered alarm and panic. Predictions that the country will not meet the millennium development goal for child mortality caused dismay....