Beyond male and female, the right to humanity
Nothing new in the article as most of the things were covered in previous days articles.
Kumar Kaushal v. NAZ Foundation
- ruling in December 2013 re-criminalised gays and lesbians, and overruled the 2009 Delhi High Court’s decision that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was not applicable to consensual sexual relations between adults.
- primarily concerned with Right to privacy
National Legal Services Authority (NLSA) v. Union Of India:
- Recent judgement on transgenders.
- concerned with Right to Equality
- judges heard with approval a host of foreign judgments relating to the rights of transgendered persons, without throwing a nationalist anti-western hissy fit.
- judges accepted the broad definition of transgender as including persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behaviour did not conform to their biological sex, and more importantly, those who did not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth.
- sex discrimination in Indian constitutional law includes discrimination on the grounds of gender identity, and rejected the view that it was limited to biological sex.
Tasks before the Navy chief
- to shore up sagging levels of morale,
- put in place contracts to replace ageing equipment, and
- chart a course-correction
- Navy’s submarine fleet is aged — only one of its existing 13 diesel-electric conventional submarines is new; the rest have been in service for 20 years or more.
- Delays in production and acquisition, and the Defence Ministry taking inordinately long to clear proposals, has reduced the fleet strength.
- There are huge operational gaps when it comes to submarines, helicopters and minesweepers.
The Navy’s future will depend on the acquisition of state-of-the-art equipment and spares with minimal delay.
Over 41 per cent of urban households and 60 per cent of rural households with access to safe water get contaminated water, a report published in the British medical journal, The Lancet , has said.
Although 99.6 per cent of urban and over 97 per cent of rural households surveyed had access to safe water, as defined by the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target 7c indicator, water was contaminated in 41.5 per cent (284 of 685) of urban and 60 per cent (715 of 1,191) of rural households, the study said.
The MDG target 7c aims to halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. With 89 per cent coverage globally and 91 per cent coverage in India in 2011, the U.N. monitoring bodies judge the world to be on track for access to drinking water.
New Hepatitis C drug, a big boon for domestic players
The spread of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has long been a cause for concern in developing countries as the liver disease, if untreated, can cause liver cirrhosis and liver cancer and has a high mortality rate.
But a break-through drug by U.S. pharmaceutical giant, Gilead, with its sofosbuvir (brandname Sovaldi), is offering succour with a very high cure rate. It is a direct-acting antiviral (DAA) administered orally and is considered a breakthrough as existing treatment is injection-based and has severe side effects. Treatment time is reduced from 24-48 weeks to 12 weeks without side effects.
It is believed that India, “the generic pharmaceutical capital of the world” can once again come to the rescue. India first earned the above sobriquet in the late 1990s when it supplied generic versions of high-priced AIDS drugs to patients in sub-Saharan Africa at a fraction of then prevailing prices.
Gilead is reportedly already talking to Indian generic manufacturers to licence them to sell sofosbuvir in about 60 countries. But major markets where the disease is prevalent are excluded from the voluntary licence, said Ms Menghaney.
Magical storyteller passes away
Tributes poured on Friday for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel-winning Colombian author, whose “magical realism” told epic stories of love, family and dictatorship in Latin America. Marquez, 87, died on Thursday. Known affectionately as Gabo, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera was one of the world’s most popular Latin American writers.
The Hindu ’s analysis of data from the five states that first voted with NOTA option in the December 2013 Assembly elections — Delhi, Mizoram, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan — shows that constituencies reserved for Scheduled Tribes are over-represented in the list of seats with most NOTA votes: 23 of the 25 constituencies are ST reserved.
One explanation could be that upper castes in reserved constituencies are choosing to use the NOTA option rather vote for a tribal or Dalit . After the Assembly election, a BJP spokesperson in Chhattisgarh told The Hindu that OBCs in some tribal constituencies voted NOTA to reassert their importance as they felt the BJP was trying to woo tribals. In Rajasthan, the District Magistrate of a tribal-dominated constituency said members of an agrarian OBC community told him they had voted NOTA. “The leader told me that everyone was pampering tribals and so they had voted NOTA ,” the DM said.
Others disagree with this explanation. “I don’t think that people are consciously voting in this way. It might be that people in these constituencies, who are not very well educated, are simply pressing the wrong button,” Sanjay Kumar, director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and an expert on voter behaviour said.
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