The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

The government’s draft report on black money — that has been circulated to members of the high level committee on black money for final comments — confirms that details of the HSBC accounts in Geneva have given the country its biggest black money trail. Citing this as an instance where the government has moved fast in tracing the coded account holders, the report states that the receipt resulted in information...

Handloom weavers in Andhra Pradesh are in a crisis brought on by policy blindness and the emphasis on powerlooms. WHEN P. Pulliah, a weaver in the traditional cotton handloom centre of Chirala in Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh, describes the sarees he crafts, thread by delicate thread, his face lights up with joy. He animatedly explains that the sarees have a border on both sides. And they are fully embellished, he...

-The Times of India   According to the study conducted by a botany student for her PhD thesis, highly protein deficient diet of Korku and Gond tribes in Central India is one of the reasons of malnutrition in them. Mostly these tribal people eat only locally available plant-based diets which are rich sources of carbohydrates, some minerals and vitamins but no proteins. Study suggests identification and consumption of locally available beans, mushrooms and...

More than 80 per cent complaints filed under the seven-year-old domestic violence act have been declared too trivial for such a law to address, raising fears that it is being used to settle scores while graver atrocities go unreported. However, the nature of many complaints also suggests that women are no longer willing to play a subservient role in marital life. The highest number of complaints related to charges that the husband...