The smart cities scheme of the government will require an investment of Rs 7 lakh crore over a period of 20 years. According to a draft concept note on the scheme released by the ministry of urban development (MoUD), a high power expert committee
Bursting at its seams, India’s financial capital is marred by inadequate public infrastructure. Ironically, our municipality (the richest civic body in Asia) and our administrators have not been able to provide the bare minimum facility of t
It has been mora than 10 weeks since you took charge of the ministry. What have been the significant achievements of this short period? I think the most significant achievement would be that we got this ministry working. Fo
Only one-fourth of beneficiaries’ database has been seeded by Aadhaar under five social sector schemes in half the country, according to a senior official working with unique identification authority of India (UIDAI). The authority,
The numbers are mindboggling. There are 2,179 revenue courts spread across Uttar Pradesh’s 75 districts – and their tehsils and blocks. Between them, these courts have 24,19,035 cases pending. And till recently, it was an arduous task
In December 8, 2008, Delhi assembly election results were to be announced and, working as a correspondent for a television channel, I had to report at chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s residence at seven in the morning. This was going to be on
It is an article of faith embedded in each and every planning document: India must reduce its dependence on the monsoon. Must! Agriculture’s share in India’s GDP has fallen well below 20 percent. Yet our economy is depen
The government plans to set up a national certification agency to certify upcoming private sector laboratories in the area of electronics and information technology. Testing of equipments being an extremely important part of maintaining a
Women journalists on Tuesday staged a dharna in front of chief minister’s office in Hyderabad seeking his immediate intervention on the ‘illegal’ ban on media in the new state of Telangana. Prominent news channel
Ruling out any possibility of talking with the Pakistani army, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has said that "governments only talks with governments, (and) not the army or inter-services intelligence." Stressing that the
Much before dalit assertion became an everyday political reality, there was Amritlal Nagar. Among the writer’s most famous works is ‘Nachyo Bahut Gopal’, the story of a brahmin woman falling in love with a manual scavenger and ge
“Daddy, what’s a smart city?” my seven-year-old asked. I’d just got off the phone discussing a talk I was to give on it, and she’d also heard that ‘Modi uncle’ wanted to build smart cities.
In June this year the Australian government detained a boat with 157 people, including women and children. For nearly a month they were held at sea and then sent to a detention centre on the Pacific island of Nauru, as Australia has recently harde
One of the primary issues around which the 2014 general election was fought and won was corruption. India’s record with Transparency International is far from satisfactory. Though transparency is critical in curbing corruption, the Right to
In a month when global CEOs and celebrities got consumed by the 100-dollar ice-bucket rave, India Inc. seemed to have discovered its homegrown ‘equivalent’ in the form of several `100-crore corporate social responsibility (CSR) project
If Rahul Gandhi still believes he is a ‘Young Turk’ with a natural connect with the youth, especially pre-teens, given his age, he should watch the recordings of prime minister Narendra Modi’s interaction with students on Friday
The cliché about India – whatever you say about it, the opposite is equally true – can be applied to Narendra Modi too. Thus, his growing number of fans and the remaining critics both are sometimes right. That may not have been
Foreign medical graduates are a worried lot. Reason: out of 6,000 students who appeared for the screening test on June 17, only 250 cleared it. Conducted by the National Board of Exams (NBE), the test screens such students to
Could thickness of partition walls in a college building or the library not stocking ‘sufficient’ number of journals be a reason for a college to be denied permission to admit students? As it turns out, it could be. The
The regional comprehensive economic partnership (RECP) agreement is in an “extremely critical state” and talks must take into account each country’s strengths for any plurilateral negotiation, commerce secretary Rajeev Kher has s
