News stories by Ranjit Devraj, page 8

As India is rocked by a series of billion-dollar scams, the question on everybody's mind is whether the perpetrators will go scot-free in what has been described as a low-risk, high-gain activity in this country.

India's Dalits are turning to the ''Goddess of English'' for deliverance from centuries of religiously-sanctioned caste oppression.

Embarrassing retractions of scientific papers and a thinly-disguised report favouring introduction of genetically modified crops by the country's top science academies have revived calls for more stringent action against plagiarism and unethical practices.

Campaigners against the death penalty in India are hopeful that a series of commutations of hanging sentences to life imprisonment this month will add up to a trend against the award of capital punishment.

With India's role as 'pharmacy to the developing world' seriously threatened by a free trade agreement to be signed with the European Union in December, the fate of cheap or free antiretroviral treatment for people living with HIV and AIDS hangs in balance.

Child rights activists hope that the arrest of the principal of one of India's elite public schools for caning a student and possibly abetting his suicide will serve to put an end to the widespread practice of corporeal punishment in this country's educational institutions.

South Asian rice farmers are switching to flood-tolerant strains of rice as insurance against inundations.

A draconian law that allows army officers to shoot civilians in areas declared 'disturbed' has come under intense scrutiny, mainly as a result of months of separatist street protests in India's Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state.

When India's Supreme Court reacted to the news that thousands of tonnes of grain were rotting in the rain due to lack of granary space and ordered the government to distribute the surplus free of cost to the hungry, it seemed like the logical thing to do.

Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion inhabitants.