Feature Article

Anna Hazare’s hunger strike against corruption in April 2011 attracted disparate intellectual strands from within the Indian middle class. These strands brought complementary skills to the table. The neo-Gandhians conferred legitimacy; India Shining provided energy and finances; and Legal Activists helped navigate the legislative path. The movement also attracted the opprobrium of the Independent Left. Understanding these intellectual strands helps explain the Anna Hazare movement. Equally, the movement sheds light on India’s new middle classes and their forms of political engagement.

Pakistan’s Lady Health Workers’ programme has trained over 1,00,000 women to provide community health services in rural areas. Not only has the programme revitalised the primary health care system, it has also helped overcome the gendered division of public and private space that is a major obstacle to women’s access to basic services, including education, and employment opportunities. However, there are a number of shortcomings that need government intervention to ensure that it fulfils its aims.

A shortage of doctors in rural India cannot be resolved by casual announcements. (Editorial)

Expanding its role beyond maintaining peace in conflict areas, the UN Security Council, issued its first statement on climate change. Its text was, however, weakened by disagreements about the role of 15-member body in combating climate change as well as on how definitively can climate change be linked to security.


Many countries, especially developing, want climate change to be left to other UN bodies like United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is already dealing with global warming.

When the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced this month that it did not have the authority to oversee a new variety of genetically modified (GM) Kentucky bluegrass, it exposed a serious weakness in the regulations governing GM crops. These are based not on a plant's GM nature but on the techniques used for its genetic modification. With changing technologies, the department says that it lacks the authority to regulate newly created transgenic crops.

Researchers like to work on projects that start small and slowly scale up. They must think bigger and faster, says Sandy J. Andelman, to tackle today's problems in time.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7356/full/475290a.html

Technological advances remove basis for government oversight of genetically modified crops.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/475274a.html

It is time to update decades-old regulation of genetically engineered crops. (Editorial)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7356/full/475265b.html

Tales of fake vaccination drives are the least of Pakistan's public-health problems. A disjointed care system and lack of services are doing more damage. (Editorial)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7356/full/475265a.html