India's historic anti-graft law; Record decline in Japanese population; One man's wait for a polio-free India

1 India's historic anti-graft law (Straits Times) India's president took the final step to create a powerful anti-graft watchdog on Wednesday, signing it into law two years after a mass anti-corruption movement swept the country and galvanised politicians into action. Parliament saw rare unity last month when the ruling Congress and main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party approved the bill creating a corruption ombudsman with sweeping powers to prosecute all politicians and civil servants.

President Pranab Mukherjee's final approval of the law comes as the world's largest democracy gears up for general elections due by May. Voters have become increasingly incensed by a string of corruption scandals that have engulfed the nation.

http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/asia/story/indian-president-signs-historic-anti-graft-law-20140101

2 Record decline in Japanese population (BBC) Japan's population declined by a record 244,000 people in 2013, according to health ministry estimates. The ministry said an estimated 1,031,000 babies were born last year - down some 6,000 from the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of people that died last year was 1,275,000 - a rise of around 19,000 from 2012.

Japan's population has been shrinking for several years now. If current trends persist it will lose a third of its population in the next 50 years. A quarter of the population is currently aged over 65 and that figure is expected to reach nearly 40% by 2060. The government says the population totalled 126,393,679 as of 31 March - down 0.2% from a year earlier.

Japan has taken aggressive measures in recent months to spur growth in the world's third-biggest economy, after years of stagnation. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is trying to boost the economy through a combination of quantitative easing and cash injections, higher taxes, higher government spending and longer-term structural reforms.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25566868

3 One man's wait for a polio-free India (Saptarishi Dutta in The Wall Street Journal) Polio eradication campaigner Ramesh Ferris, who has lived with the paralyzing nervous system disease since was just six months old, is hoping to see the country – and global eradication efforts — soon reach a major milestone. If no new cases of polio infection are reported in the country by Jan. 13, it will allow the World Health Organization, the United Nations’ public health arm, to declare the disease officially eradicated from its Southeast Asia zone, which includes 11 countries.

The last such polio case in the region was reported in India’s West Bengal state on Jan. 13, 2011. For a zone to be certified polio-free, all the countries in that group must complete three years without a single new infection caused by the wild polio virus. An announcement confirming this status is expected to take place in March, after laboratory tests of stool samples of recently paralyzed children rule out wild polio infection, said Lokesh Gupta, manager of the Rotary International’s India polio eradication campaign.

The polio virus spreads primarily through contaminated food and water, and affects the nervous system, leading to irreversible paralysis in about one out of 200 cases, according to the WHO. India, which has been battling polio for about 35 years through the use of an oral vaccine, is regarded as success story in the global fight to wipe out the disease, to which young children are particularly vulnerable. India reported 741 new cases of polio as recently as 2009 more than any other country in the world. It then took a more aggressive approach, and ramped up its focus on high-risk groups. The program now covers 170 million children in two rounds of vaccination a year. Just three years later, the WHO took India’s name off the list of polio-endemic countries. In 2012, there were only 223 polio cases worldwide, down from 350,000 in 1988.

For the 34-year-old Mr. Ferris, India’s completion of three years without polio will have enormous personal significance. He contracted polio in the southern Indian city of Coimbatore when he was an infant. By the time he was a year old, and unable to walk, his impoverished birth mother decided to give him up for adoption.

Mr. Ferris then grew up in Canada where he learned to walk with the help of braces and crutches, and also underwent numerous surgeries. But he also suffered mockery and derision over his condition, which was rarely seen there. But it was a visit to India – his first since his adoption – that led him to begin actively campaigning for the global eradication of polio. That was in 2002, when he flew to India to meet Lakshmi, his biological mother.

During his visit, he saw a middle-aged polio-affected man crawling on the ground using rubber pieces to pad his knees and sandals covering his palms. “This was absolutely appalling and horrific. That was my eye-opening experience in terms of what the reality of life is like for many polio survivors in India and around the world,” he said. Mr. Ferris has since campaigned in Canada for global polio eradication, but also in other countries where the disease still prevails.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2014/01/01/one-mans-anxious-wait-for-a-polio-free-india/