If home minister P Chidambaram’s recent letter to West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indication, it has taken the Union home ministry seven years to realise that arming civilians to fight Naxalites is a bad idea. How much longer will it take for them to realise that the current paramilitary-based approach in Chhattisgarh is similarly bound to fail? From 2003 onwards, the home ministry has followed a policy of...

The Environment and Forests Ministry was in news throughout 2010 -- be it for Vedanta Resources, Posco and Lavasa -- or for Jairam Ramesh's aggressive green activism. While the ministry rejected the green signal to Vedanta for its $1.7 billion project to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa noting that the company violated the environment and forests rules, it put the $12 billion project by South Korean steelmaker Posco...

One out of every five children from the tribal talukas of Thane could be suffering from a serious heart ailment. This was the diagnosis of a medical camp conducted by the district health officer at Wada, 75 km from Thane, recently. Of the 125 children in the 4-15 age group, who underwent the echocardiogram test, 25 were detected with abnormal heart movements, setting off alarm bells in the local medical...

‘For the Indian media, the key question is one of covering mass deprivation' Time to rediscover concept of freedom of press in Marxist terms: Sashi Kumar N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, has called for “bold and radical” ways to check the ethical failings of the media. Inaugurating a seminar ‘Whither Media,' organised as part of the three-day Third International Congress on Kerala Studies, which concluded here on Monday, Mr. Ram said that...

Many endosulfan sufferers in Kerala still not recognised NARAYANA Vokalliga from Belur village in Kasaragod breathed his last on November 20 just as his son was explaining how his father had suffered from exposure to endosulfan for 30 years. The former employee of the Plantation Corporation of Kerala used to spray the toxic pesticide manually in the corporation’s cashew plantations at Nanjamparamba estate. When the corporation switched to aerial spraying, Narayan prepared...