In what may change the way banks and cellphone companies as well as official agencies collect and process information about individuals, the government is proposing legislation that will empower citizens with sweeping rights to legal recourse against any misuse of personal data. The first draft of the proposed legislation has been released for public debate by the department of personnel and training (DoPT). The main aim of the umbrella legislation will be...

Six years after a Human Development Report on Gujarat was published, the state government has embarked on another survey for a similar report, albeit district-wise, whose publication date is yet to be decided. So far, study reports on five districts — Surendranagar, Jamnagar, Sabarkantha, Dangs and Surat — have been submitted whose drafts have been reviewed and sent back to the authors for consideration. G K Vyas, Director, Human Development, said that...

United Nations agencies today launched new international guidelines aimed at helping to protect health workers who provide care to people infected with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) from becoming infected themselves in the course of their work. The guidelines, drafted by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), are designed to help doctors, nurses and midwives, pharmacists and laboratory technicians, as...

Rahul Gandhi, the general secretary of India’s Congress party, often says that there exist “two Indias” — one of the rich, and one of the poor. Those two Indias were in evidence a couple of weeks ago, when closely timed events on opposite sides of the planet brought into relief the deep divides that in many ways define this country. In Mumbai on Nov. 7, President Barack Obama told a group of...

Writes to Azad expressing concern over its inclusion in Public health programme The Union government's decision to allow the use of injectable contraceptives, as part of the Public health programme in the country, would be a harmful step that will affect the health of women, Member of Parliament and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat has said. In a letter to the Union Health and Family Welfare Minister...