-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today asked all authorities to stick to the guidelines laid down by a Constitution bench 54 years ago while invoking the sedition law. The five-judge bench had ruled in 1962 that the sedition law could be activated only if "violence and public disorder" had been incited. The directive today came against a backdrop of complaints that sedition cases were being filed indiscriminately to crush dissent and...

-The Hindu Health-care workers at the primary level must be given the knowledge and skills to provide NCD and associated risk factor care. Noncommunicable diseases (NCD) such as diabetes, respiratory diseases, cancer and heart diseases are taking a severe toll on public health across the WHO South-East Asia Region. Approximately 8.5 million lives, many of them premature, are lost each year due to NCDs, making them the region’s leading cause of death...

-The Indian Express While crimes against Dalits are increasing, the state has time and again let them down, with little action against the perpetrators. Atrocities against Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) are a regular feature of the caste-based Indian society and distressingly, of late, they have begun increasing. What is ironical is that only recently, the country commemorated the 125th birth anniversary of B .R. Ambedkar, the icon of the...

-The Hindu The National Medical Commission Bill’s proposal to permit ‘for profit’ colleges will undermine the aim of creating a cadre of medical professionals able and willing to work in small towns and villages The many reports commissioned by the Government of India on the state of medical care invariably highlight one fact: a large number of Indians do not have access to proper and adequate medical care. India currently faces a “double...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...