The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered private hospitals functioning on public land to make good their promise to treat the poor for free. This decision is intended to change the belief that “health care is given only to those who can afford it”. The bench of Justices R V Raveendran and A K Patnaik passed a short order after a detailed hearing in which lawyers representing several private hospitals tried to...

-The Hindu   The National Human Rights Commission has issued a notice to Karnataka on media reports that around 8,000 people still make a living through the banned practice of manual scavenging in the State. The Commission, which suo motu took cognizance of the reports, said that if they were true, they raised a serious issue of violation of the human rights of those engaged in the inhuman job. The notice, returnable in four...

Why we are doing this story     * Tribal lands are under pressure across India. In Orissa, they have been holding out against big corporates like Vedanta and Posco. *** From afar, the fumes rising from factory chimneys in Gujarat’s industrial belt make them seem like skyscrapers on fire. It’s a grey rust-and-chemicals stretch that they call, without irony, the Golden Corridor. It extends all the way from the north of Ahmedabad, through...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...

-The Telegraph   The brother of Prabhat Nayek, an East Midnapore native killed in Wednesday’s blasts in Mumbai, today alleged he had to pay Rs 9,000 to police to get the body out of the J.J. Hospital morgue. “I had to pay the police Rs 9,000 to get my elder brother’s body out of the hospital morgue,” Gurupada said at his home in Brajalalpur village, Patashpur, this evening. He said the police again...