The Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry on Tuesday approved a scheme for providing highly subsidised sanitary napkins to adolescent girls in the rural areas to promote menstrual hygiene. The scheme, to be launched in 150 districts across the country in the first phase, will cost Rs.150 crore for the current financial year. Approved by the Mission Steering Group – the highest decision-making body – of the National Rural Health...

Monsanto licencees have earned over Rs 1,500 crore since 2002. A quiet but determined battle is being fought in the courts, and outside, by US agricultural biotech giant Monsanto, its Indian affiliates and seed lobbyists to free the prices of genetically modified Bt cotton from state government control. At stake is huge business running into several thousand crore of rupees, with royalty alone on the Bt cotton seeds grossing over Rs...

RAJINDER SACHAR is one of India’s renowned civil rights activists. A former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, Sachar has done pioneering work in enabling a legal framework to assist hundreds who stand accused by the police across India for waging war against the State, many of them with little or dubious evidence. Though 87 years old, Sachar continues to work tirelessly with one of India’s key rights groups,...

Though many migrant workers from south Madhya Pradesh have died of the incurable workplace disease called silicosis contracted from inhaling quartz dust in stone crushing factories in Gujarat, the public health system has carried out no comprehensive survey to identify the disease, which is often passed off as tuberculosis, many factories have not installed anti-pollution systems, and the NHRC has been sitting on the case since 2006 “He kept coughing…became more...

It is indeed heartening to note that most states have been growing remarkably fast, going by the Central Statistical Organisation’s (CSO) current data on the economic growth of states over the last decade. Even chronically poor states such as Orissa, Bihar, Rajasthan and, more anaemically, Uttar Pradesh have participated in the boom, sending out a clear message that no state can be written off. One can argue that GDP alone...