Rahul Gandhi in Gujarat ahead of state assembly polls in 2017 Even as the Congress plans its first working committee meet in Gujarat on February 28 after an almost 58 year gap , there is reason to wonder what is in store for India’s grand old party in a state which has been long been a BJP bastion – in fact ever since mid-1990s. Ahead of the then assembly polls in late 2012, talking with me, a senior Gujarat Congress leader, currently Rajya Sabha MP, frankly said he saw no reason why Congress would win.

  Has Gujarat faltered in the fight against tobacco vis-à-vis other states? It would seem so, despite the data suggesting the percentage of men and women using “some form of tobacco” (smoking cigarettes, bidis, cigars, pipe, hookah, chewing paan with tobacco, using gutkha or paan masala with tobacco, using khaini, using usoing snuff etc.) have come down considerably. The National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4) data for 2015-16, released a year ago, suggest that 51 per cent of men and seven per cent of women in the age group 15-49 “use some form of tobacco”, which is seventh highest among 21 major Indian states. A similar household survey held a decade earlier (NFHS-3), which took place in 2005-06, suggested that 10 per cent more men (60%) used “some form of tobacco”. As for women, in 2005-06, the tobacco use was found to be eight per cent. However, at that time, as many as nine other major states out of 19 for which survey results have been obtained had a higher per...

  Is the Government of India dilly-dallying over the issue of banning e-cigarettes, which have been declared by anti-tobacco activists across the world as providing “an entryway to nicotine addiction”, especially among the kids? It would seem so, if the latest developments are any guide.

  Four-and-a-half years after India declared its “intention” to ban e-cigarettes, considering them as risk to public health, especially the non-smoking youths (click HERE ), following the World Health Organization (WHO) in August 2014 seeking “stiff regulation” across the world, its “booming” $3 billion global market appears all set to dangerously invade India. The Union ministry of health and family welfare, in October 2014 had called e-cigarettes, which use battery-powered cartridges to produce a nicotine-laced vapor, a “backdoor entry” to health risk, because has nicotine, pointing out that expert panels have already recommended regulation or a ban. The ministry view came after e-cigarettes, imported and sold by small firms, began being sold by India’s largest cigarette maker, ITC. Meanwhile, over more than four years, they are available on online stores, including on Amazon India , Electronic Cigarette India and Vapour India . In fact, four-and-a-half years on, al...

A recent research, carried out jointly by two US-based non-profit organizations, Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and Center for WorkLife Law (WLL), based at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, has found that 45% of women engineers as against 28% of men engineers complained that it was perceived as “inappropriate when women argued at work, even when it was work-related.”