Police officers of Chhattisgarh would have us believe that people fall inside bathrooms at police stations deliberately to break their own heads or backs and later blame it on custodial torture. They say that’s what happened with Soni Sori, an ashramshala teacher from Jabeli village in the Maoist-affected Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, on October 10. In pain, drifting in and out of consciousness, benumbed by the ‘good cop, bad cop’...

A large and costly AIDS prevention program that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pioneered in India eight years ago has had mixed results, according to a preliminary analysis published on Monday in The Lancet. The foundation spent $258 million on the program from 2003 to 2008. It has since put in $80 million more, but is shifting responsibility to the Indian government. The program, called Avahan, focuses on high-risk groups, like...

At a time that land in urban centres, especially in the big metropolitan cities, is at a premium, a Working Group of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has suggested that, as far as possible, slum dwellers should be resettled at the spot where they are currently living, rather than displacing them, so that they continue to remain close to their places of work. NAC sources said the Working...

The popular outrage over the official definition of poverty at abysmally low levels of daily income, of Rs 26 in rural areas and Rs 32 in urban areas, assumes the state will deny basic services to a household whose income is above the figure. This is totally erroneous. There is no mechanism in the hands of the government to ascertain income or expenditure to identify the 'poor' on the ground. The...

A five-year effort to promote condom use by sex workers and their clients and the use of safe needles by drug users may have helped India prevent about 100,000 HIV infections, according to a study to be released tomorrow. The study suggests that the high-profile HIV prevention initiative called Avahan, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented in six states, was less effective in Nagaland, Manipur and Maharashtra...