-The Indian Express The Rajat Gupta case provokes a question: Could the Indian system handle such a situation as well? Rajat Gupta has got two years in prison for insider trading, a fraction of the term sought by the prosecution. It is a fair sentence, delivered without regard for the multiple pressures that had been brought to bear on this much-publicised case. The handling of the case — among about 60 others...

-The Times of India Everyone agrees that India needs to deliver social protection to the aam admi; the forthcoming Food Security Bill is one such attempt. Everyone also agrees that the government service delivery pipelines are riddled with leakages and largescale corruption. Direct cash transfers have been proposed as a way to remedy this defective system. However, as could be expected, the debate has become polarised, with one side believing that cash...

-The Economic Times Nazia is 10 years old. But, according to a claim filed by Chhattisgarh-based Shaheed Hospital with the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY), she has delivered a baby after a caesarean operation. Mukul (name changed) is only 7. But Agarwal Hospital, Raipur, has made a claim for removing cataract from his eyes. A large number of similar implausible claims, being made by private hospitals enrolled to treat poor patients under...

-The Hindu One in eight people, or 12.5 per cent of the world’s population, is chronically undernourished today says the latest State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) report. The grave ethical and practical implications of this abominable statistic from the three Rome-based United Nations agencies are obvious. Not least because mass hunger is a man-made phenomenon. Historically, hunger and starvation have been caused not by shortfalls in food production but rather by...

-The Hindu The new Bill should pitch for free care to mental health patients in public hospitals. Persons with mental illness have long been subjected to cruelty, neglect, ridicule and stigma. In the last half-century, medical science has made significant strides in finding some cures and palliatives for afflictions of the mind – of emotion, mood, thinking and behaviour. Parallel to this is the evolution in our ethical frameworks: of human rights,...