THE government in India continues to kow-tow to corporate lobbies at the cost of the environment and public health including occupational health. While always an integral part of ruling class politics in India, as witnessed in the seemingly never-ending saga of the Bhopal Gas Disaster, this has reached new heights under the BJP government led by PM Narendra Modi which is rapidly dismantling even the already weak environmental regulatory structure. Its mantra seems to be “development” at any cost.

THE recent spate of infections and deaths, caused by the H1N1 strain of the influenza virus across many states in India has once again brought into focus India’s ailing health care system. It is unfortunate that discussions on the country’s non-functioning public health system surface only in periods when the health system is faced with a challenge. WHAT IS SWINE FLU?Influenza caused by the H1N1 virus is also popularly called ‘swine flu’.

DURING Barack Obama’s visit to India, one of the important promises Prime Minister Modi made to the US President was related to the conflict between US and India on intellectual property rights (IPR). The Joint Indo-US statement is unambiguous about whose interests matter most to the BJP government. In the name of making the country’s IPR regime investor friendly, the Modi government is promising to meet the US demands that the previous governments were unwilling to accept. So far, India’s publicly stated position was that there is no need to change the intellectual property (IP) regime.

THE 102nd Science Congress did not distinguish itself by inviting speakers, who offered mumbo jumbo as science. It was not helped by the union minister for science and technology, Harsh Vardhan talking about how India had discovered the Pythagoras “formula”, and algebra well before Greeks and Arabs but generously gave them the “credit”. The past is no longer about scientifically discovering what really happened, but a race of who did what first.

THE US, based on FBI reports, has blamed North Korea for hacking the Sony, the entertainment giant. In return, Obama threatened cyber attacks or what he called “proportionate response” against North Korea; the North Korean Internet did go down after Obama's threats. North Korea denied the US allegations and has called for an international enquiry to establish who are behind the Sony attack.