By noon daily, the reception area of Surya Clinic in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar begins to fill up. Patients admitted for gyanecological care are clothed in the blue robes of the hospital and ushered into clean rooms with freshly made beds. At the state-run primary health centre (PHC) in Bochahan block of Muzaffarpur, which also offers family planning services, disposable gloves are washed and re-used and rusted beds are covered with...

The Left Front government today tried to woo back poor voters by enacting a law that confers land rights on impoverished families who have forcibly occupied plots and built homes there. Two lakh families, categorised in the bill as agricultural labourers, fishermen and artisans and described as “very poor’’, will benefit from the law. The settlement rights will be given only up to five-and-a-half cottahs and only if the squatters have...

The CBI, which now says that it has evidence to seek the extradition of former Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson in the Bhopal gas tragedy case, had in 2002 sought dilution of charges against him. Court documents have revealed the CBI had filed an application in a Bhopal court eight years ago stating that Anderson be tried for having caused death due to negligence and not for culpable homicide not amounting...

Justice N Santosh Hegde, till this week the lok ayukta of Karnataka, a former Supreme Court judge and the son of the famous late Justice K S Hegde, who resigned from the Supreme Court of India in protest against his supersession by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, contributing to events that culminated in her imposition of national Emergency, has spoken for millions of concerned citizens across the country by quitting...

It's perhaps the first time the Union government has rejected an industrial project floated by an MP of its own party. In fact, the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) has asked Chhattisgarh government to take action against Congress MP and industrialist Naveen Jindal's company, Jindal Power Limited (JPL). Worse, a close look at the exchange between JPL and various government bodies shows the company persisted with the project despite...