President Pranab Mukherjee, who demits office soon, has been known as a man “of the constitution”, a believer in it, and was called to be its custodian during the last five years. His familiarity with the country’s constitution, as also the constitution of the Congress, was legendary and ‘Pranab da’ was the man to go to if any clarity was required on a provision or a grey area. He has left his mark on Rashtrapati Bhavan by opening it to the public and equally by speaking up about tolerance. Governance now assesses his term as president.

 

 

In a historic move, the government, after nearly two decades, ratified two of International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) core conventions on child labour – convention number 138 (minimum age of labour) and convention number 182, which bans all the worst forms of child labour. The ratification has deservedly received praise from ILO and child rights activists. The government termed it as a “milestone initiative” with the “aim of realising a ‘child labour free India’ and restoring to the children what is rightfully theirs – their childhood and their dreams”. But the question is: Will the ratification alone ensure welfare and safety of the children in India?

 

 

The world’s largest mass migration is currently underway in India. Indians are city bound. They are abandoning villages for a variety of reasons that range from drought to dreams. It’s a massive movement every day... This is also the right time for India to foray into unexplored new ground to decisively rewrite and reconfigure existing knowledge about urban life, cities and its future. It’s the right time, because we Indians know that we need cities.

 

 

India has, relatively speaking, moved up significantly in automation. The protection of the automated and unautomated systems, which run most of the critical infrastructure, however, is still in its early days. India doesn’t have a strong defence mechanism to deal with threats from the state actors. It has come a long way though. Here is a brief on the major works undertaken by the government in last ten years in cyber security.

 

 

Though there is no way to arrive at exact numbers, psychiatrists and others in healthcare are in no doubt that the number of women abusing substances (from alcohol to all kinds of drugs) is increasing. For a country of more than 585 million females, India has only three de-addiction centres dedicated to women – one in Delhi, one in Manipur, and one in Mizoram. The condition of government-run de-addiction centres (where men and women are usually treated together) is pathetic; addicts who can afford it prefer private de-addiction centres, which are expensive, and those who cannot register and wait for their turn at centres run by NGOs.