On April 27, 1998, a 60-year-old Tibetan doused himself with petrol, set himself alight, ran out onto a busy street in a crowded city, enveloped in flames, after. Thubten Ngodup’s last words, \shouted even as he was burning like a torch, were ‘Po Gyalo!’ (Victory for Tibet!) ‘Po Rangzen!’ (Free Tibet!). His act of self-immolation…
Geneva, Switzerland -- Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Myanmar pro-democracy leader, will participate in the tenth annual high-level retreat of mediators and peace process actors, known as the Oslo forum, which will take place on 18-19 June 2012 in Oslo, Norway. The overall theme for this years forum will be…
P. SAINATH of "The Hindu" is a journalist I respect. He is one of the few journalists who visit the countryside and file stories which are earthy and full of passion. His reports on paid news exposed a practice in Maharashtra and elsewhere where newspapers accept money to print news favourable to the one who…
Two sets of tragedies dominate headlines, both in our region and in other parts of India. And both are related, unfortunately, to the North-east. The first relate to the tragic deaths in quick succession of a young student from Meghalaya in the Delhi region at a private university and of an architecture student in Bangalore…
The state of Assam in northeast India has the highest maternal mortality rate (MMR) in the country. One of the reasons for the abysmal record is that over three million people live on tiny islands along the Brahmaputra River without proper health infrastructure. Boat clinics on the river, an initiative of the Centre for North…
Swedish midwife, Christina Pedersen collaborating with Ipas- an organization headquartered in North Carolina, US and working around the world to increase women's ability to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, especially the right to safe abortion visited the Tinsukia and Dibrugarh Boat Clinic Units in April 2012. Her report follows with photographs of the camps…
A two and a half day C-NES Annual Review Meeting was organized at the world heritage site of Kaziranga Wild Life Sanctuary in Assam, along the Brahmaputra in an equally picturesque Wild Grass Resort, Kaziranga from 29th February to 2nd March 2012. Over 70 C-NES staff comprising of Medical Officers, District Programme Officers from the…
Last week, at a meeting without publicity and far from the headlines and hungry, aggressive media, a senior Assam health department official spoke wonderfully and evocatively in Assamese to a group of assembled doctors, health workers, organizers, activists and researchers, sharing his concerns and difficulties. The All-India National Family Welfare Survey (NFWS), released last year,…
Burma is opening up. In the past few months foreign leaders paid high-profile visits to the long-isolated country, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British Foreign Secretary William Hague who both congratulated Burma on its progress toward democratisation. These endorsements signal that Western sanctions against Burma could soon be lifted. Meanwhile, Burma’s neighbours…