Some girls are special, not because they have special abilities, but because they learn what is OBC before ABC. Other backward classes. Like my domestic help’s daughter who thought, this was a class just like classes in school, which would get over once school did. But it didn’t. After she finished class 10, she learnt that OBC was more important than ABC. While apply
There is a little bit of SAIL in everybody’s life. This line from Steel Authority of India Ltd’s ad campaign is now familiar to most of the Indians. The share sale of the state-run firm is expected to mop up Rs 6,000 crore at then current market prices around Diwali. Unbelievable! SAIL is the same PSU that in February 2000 posted losses of around Rs 1,500 crore but the government ca
I mentioned in a previous column how small towns were producing big innovations, how small institutions were producing big minds and even bigger hearts. Concern for social needs, whether of small industry or the informal sector, is not found universally among all social, professional or educational segments. But those who have it often are motivated by the urge to produce innovations for larger
Dear Arunaji, Since the day Anna Hazare sat on fast at Jantar Mantar demanding the passage of a strong Lokpal bill, you have emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the anti-graft ombudsman proposed by Team Anna. You have expressed your disagreement through various newspaper articles and TV interviews. In this scenario, I doubt if many people know that it was y
When the Gyandoot project won the prestigious Stockholm Challenge Award in 2001, it was the first e-governance initiative that caught the attention of the whole nation. Dr Rajesh Rajora, the then district magistrate of Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh, became the e-governance champion of the nation. But a decade later no one is talking about the project or the champion behind its success. It is
India’s financial capital, Mumbai, experienced yet another terrorist attack today that initial estimates say killed at least 20. Terrorists detonated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in three separate locations of the city almost simultaneously. The first two blasts occurred at around 6:55 pm, one in a jewelry market and one in a business district in southern Mumbai. The third
Just as it went after Team Anna for daring to question the government on its will to fight corruption vis-à-vis the Lokpal bill, a good section of the English media is now cross with the
A large number of grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge practices have been scouted through the Honey Bee Network. And yet, many everyday life problems still remain unresolved. The list below gives an idea of some such unsolved problems which are in need of urgent solution. We have to parameterise the problems, contextualise them and then pose a national challenge to address them in
An 11-page note dated May 9, prepared by attorney general Goolam E Vahanvati, has all you want to know about the exemption of the central bureau of investigation (CBI) from the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. CBI had sent its request for exemption from the RTI Act to the Department of personnel and training (DoPT) which forwarded it to the department of legal affa
Atithi devo bhavah (Guest is God), for me, hold true as long as guests come for a short stay - unlike this distant cousin of mine from Bokaro, who had to stay with me for almost a month trying to land a Delhi University (DU) admission. I had no recollections of who she was and how we were related, but I was told that I had to take her around Delhi for four weeks. DU, after a
In recent years, specifically after the civil nuclear deal with the US, India seemed to have emerged with a validated nuclear identity and was seen as being on the right side of the nuclear regime. This was a result of intense negotiations and particularly a great deal of effort put in by the George W Bush administration that not only acknowledged India’s so-called “responsible nucl
With the increasing penetration of the internet connectivity in India, the question of protecting children from exposure to harmful web content and web predators is becoming important here too. To this end, governments and international organisations have adopted a mechanism called child online protection (COP) to ensure cyber-security for children and prevent them from cyber-bullying.&nb
It happened in 1975 and 1989, and it has happened once again. Corruption has emerged as the common denominator binding the agents of change. Each of the leaders of the ongoing anti-corruption movement has worked extensively on some other cause: Anna Hazare on rural development and Arvind Kejriwal on direct democracy, for example. But it was people’s anguish against the widespread
Outsourcing is as old as – wait, let me get my researcher to check that out for you. Ancient civilisations didn’t think twice before getting neighbouring civilisations to build irrigation canals, for instance, in return for sharing the benefits of farming. If you think about it, getting somebody else to do your work cannot be a modern concept. The caveman who hired a smarter caveman
Kapil Sibal’s two-part article in the Hindustan Times (‘A free-floating entity’ and ‘Up the garden path’) trashing Team Anna’s version of the Lokpal Bill is breathtaking in
There is a sinister plan hatched by the Congress party to implicate Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in a web of legal cases relating to 2002 communal violence and some alleged police encounter cases. Accordingly, the Congress party led central government is working overtime to implicate, dethrone and arrest the popularly elected chief minister of Gujarat sometime between now and October th
The National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) was established in May, 2002 with a vision to establish itself as a centre of excellence by leveraging private sector resources through the public-private partnership mode for the spread of e-governance. The national taskforce on IT and software development set up in 1998 first came up with the idea of establishing an institute in coll
Let`s face the odorous truth. India is not going to meet its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of turning `open defecation free` (ODF) by 2015. Not by 2020 and not even years beyond. And this is not "vested ramblings" from donor agencies like the World Bank, UNICEF or Water Aid, that have been critical of the rural development ministry administered subsidy-driven total sanita
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in an unenviable position. He has spent seven years safe in the knowledge that everybody knows he is not his own man. He has remained largely a spectator as his party president has run a super cabinet of sorts and many of his cabinet colleagues their independent fiefdoms. His first term was remarkable for his singular assertion on the India-US civil nucl
A high-level political commitment is an imperative for pushing forward the e-governance drive in the country. ICT projects in the country are as old as two to three decades. However, successive governments have paid mere lip service to creating a conducive ICT ecology in the country. The developed countries, which invested in ICT and other emerging technologies much before the others in
