-The Telegraph Targeted policy interventions and awareness programmes needed to prevent suicide Suicide is an unfathomable tragedy. A recent  analysis of data from 113 countries shows that people in 89 nations are more likely to die of suicide than murder. Several countries in Asia have a significantly higher suicide rate than murder — the figures are 56.8 times in Japan, 33.7 times in South Korea and 31.4 times in Singapore. Among the...

-The Hindu “The current version of the text added new burdensome conditions that would impose additional limits on countries using non-voluntary licensing” Six experts from India, South Africa and the United States have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reject the current version of a proposal at the World Trade Organisation on intellectual property waivers for COVID-19 medicines, that includes vaccines, drugs and diagnostics. In October 2020, at the WTO’s Trade Related...

-TheWire.in Methods of transitional justice, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa after apartheid ended, can help address collective trauma and restore the psychological health of society. When the Khairlanji Massacre took place in 2006, I was in a boarding school, in class 8. When I heard about it, I asked a friend who, like me, belongs to the Scheduled Caste community, what exactly had happened. He told...

-Down to Earth Tough new conditions emerge in the compromise deal to ease WTO intellectual property barriers to production of COVID-19 medical tools We are back to square one. Back to the beginning after 18 months of a wearying, tortuous series of negotiations that carried on while millions of lives hung in the balance — and still do. The waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights on medicines, vaccines and diagnostics to fight the...

-Down to Earth With sustainable development goals in place, increasing democratisation and connectivity of the world, ecologisation of politics and vice-versa will become the new norm Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai wrote: In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may  seem so obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and  peace. Decreasing resource base and the  struggle for control and power leads to politicising ecological issues...