A new package has been chalked out for private health institutions with a view to extending the benefit of Janani Sahyogi Yojana to women living below poverty line. Giving this information, Minister for Public Health, Family Welfare, Medical Education and AYUSH Anup Mishra said fees has been determined for pre-natal, natal and post-natal medicare. A first installment of Rs 50 thousand will be given to the private medical institutions with...

PONDICHERRY, India — P.M.L. Kalayansundaram calls himself a human rights worker. He runs an organization that provides a variety of services to villagers in this area — legal aid, financial assistance to help them organize marriage and death ceremonies, and free refrigerated coffin boxes that they would otherwise have to procure at exorbitant rates from private merchants. On a recent afternoon, he told me that he had been determined from...

The office of the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister has no Public Information Officer (PIO) to receive applications filed under the Right to Information Act. An RTI application seeking details on who assisted (the then chief of Union Carbide) Warren Anderson, the main accused in the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, to leave the country with full VVIP protocol, was returned ‘undelivered' to activist Subash Chandra Agrawal stating that “there was no post...

The Central Information Commission decides to appeal against a judgment of the Delhi High Court that threatens to disrupt its smooth functioning. SHAILESH GANDHI, a Central Information Commissioner, recently said the Right to Information (RTI) Act faced a serious threat from the government and the judiciary. His warning came in the context of the woefully inadequate government-sanctioned resources and the number of stay orders issued by High Courts on the...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...