The National Mission to improve the delivery of justice is at work. In October 2009, on the basis of a Vision Document adopted at a judicial conference in New Delhi, the Government of India approved in principle a National Mission to reduce pendency and delays in the judicial system and enhance accountability through structural changes, higher performance standards and capacity-building. Many past attempts to achieve the goals did not yield results...

India will henceforth treat even a single case of polio anywhere in the country as a public health emergency requiring unprecedented rapid response, the health ministry announced today after the longest polio-free period in the country. Health authorities have so far detected a single patient with paralysis caused by the wild polio virus this year ---- from Howrah in Bengal on January 13 ----- according to the latest counts from the...

Pilot survey under Project Dipankar in four prosperous districts shows 87 per cent class I students of government schools are undernourished Eighty-seven per cent school children in four districts of West Bengal are undernourished right at the entry level. The shocking numbers are from the yet unpublished report of Project Dipankar, a child tracking system initiated by the department of school education in the state. The project tracks the educational performance...

Today is the ''International Day for the Eradication of Poverty'', so it an appropriate day to note how necessary it still is to emphasise this concern among Indian policy makers. Sadly, lack of official awareness is evident in all sorts of recent policy measures, for example in the cynicism of increasing oil prices that feed into all other prices with cascading effects, even when inflation has already imposed huge burdens on...

The parliamentary standing committee on law and justice is veering around to recommending exclusion of lower bureaucracy from the purview of the proposed Lokpal and facilitating setting up of powerful Lokayuktas in all states. While the panel is likely to endorse the government's bill on the basic structure of the Lokpal, including exclusion of lower bureaucracy, higher judiciary, citizen's charter and allowing PM with certain safeguards, it may also recommend that...