The water used to cool the Rawatbhata reactor was pumped back into Chambal river. Before and during my pregnancy, I drank the tap water supplied to us from the same river. I didn't go even so far as to boil this water. Nothing went wrong. Kudankulam has been in the news and how! Little did I imagine in 2002 that this remote area of southern Tamil Nadu where there are more...

-The Hindustan Times A day after a first-year MBBS student was found hanging in his hostel room at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), undergraduate students boycotting classes and other training programmes and sat outside the director’s office all day. A 2010 batch student, Anil Kumar Meena  failed to pass all three subjects in the first year. His attendance was also short, because of which the administration asked him...

The time spent by government officials replying to RTI is so little that it cannot be a pretext for them to shirk that task In August 2011, the Supreme Court made an observation which had some unintended consequences on the Right to Information (RTI) process. The judgement by Justice R.V. Raveendran is turning out to be a seemingly legitimate excuse for government officials to restrict information.  Aditya Bandopadhyay went to court when...

The Supreme Court today described the midnight crackdown on Baba Ramdev’s supporters at Ramlila Maidan last summer as a glaring example of the “trust deficit” between the government and the people, and blamed both the police and the Baba for neglecting the common man caught in the brick-batting between them.   The people who were “rudely” woken up at the maidan became the “ultimate sufferers” of the showdown in the dark between...

-The Times of India Making a strong pitch for raising diesel prices, Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council chairman C Rangarajan on Wednesday said there was a need to revise prices to reduce the huge subsidy burden and bring down the fiscal deficit.  While releasing the economic review for 2011-12, Rangarajan said it was earlier agreed to deregulate diesel prices but the decision was never implemented. He advocated a phased deregulation of diesel...