In late April, around 2,500 Rohingyas asylum seekers camped outside the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New Delhi for a month, seeking to pressure the High Commissioner to grant them refugee status. Their protest brought into focus India's broken refugee system. Experts are now urging India to bolster its protection system for refugees by signing the UN convention on refugees.

It took nearly two decades and a billion dollars, but on January 13, 2012, India celebrated its first-ever year without a single case of polio. India is one of just four countries in the world where polio—long ago eradicated in the West—has remained stubbornly endemic, thwarting a global eradication effort that began back in 1985. If this South Asian country of roughly 1 billion people remains polio-free this time, India's last ever polio case will have been Rukhsar Khatoon, an 18-month-old girl from Howrah in the Indian state of West Bengal.