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
Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had rare words of praise for his cabinet colleague when he extolled power minister Sushilkumar Shinde for the highest capacity addition of 10,462 MW between April 2010 and February 2011. In an interview with Sweta Ranjan, Shinde discusses how he plans to deliver “power to all” by nex
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
The Constituent Assembly and late Dr BR Ambedkar worked tirelessly to give shape to the Indian constitution promising us liberty, equality, rule of law and peaceful existence. The constitution was made to be a self-contained document setting out the fundamental rights, the directive principles of state policy, the constitutional plan for the separation of powers amongst different organs of gove
Rapid soil degradation is causing desertification of 81.45 million hectares, or 24.8 percent of India`s geographic area, a ministry of environment and forests report says. The new report, submitted to the UN convention to combat desertification (UNCCD), estimates that 32 percent of the total land area in the country is affected by land degradation. It identifies water and s
The Maharajah who could once become a lover boy in Paris, a sumo wrestler in Tokyo, a pavement artist, a Red Indian, a monk... who could effortlessly flirt with the beauties of the world (as quoted on the Air India website) is now gasping for breath. The late J R D Tata, the man behind the national carrier, could have never imagined that a day would come when the employees of his
Just when the attention of newsmen across the nation was fixed on the Lokpal issue, the government excluded the central bureau of investigation (CBI) from the purview of the right to information (RTI) act. And how did you and I come to know about it? The agency, responding to the RTI query filed by Subhash Chandra Agrawal told him that as per a June 9 notification, it had been in
The first ever cumulative impact assessment (CIA) study of hydro-power projects being built on Bhagirathi and Alaknanda, two tributaries of river Ganga, has come as a big disappointment. Carried out by the Alternate Hydro Energy Centre (AHEC) of IIT (Roorkee), which submitted its report to the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) recently, the study ignores the very r
Visit any hospital in Delhi and you will find a display board carrying the message that sex selection test is prohibited. Still, the number of girl children is diminishing in India. Many analysts believe that the practice of aborting the girl child has taken such deep roots that there may be no escape from it. But when it becomes a global phenomenon, what would you call it? Mary Anne Warren coi
The South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), a network of organisations working on water issues, has rejected a cumulative impact assessment of the Ganga basin hydropower projects done by the Alternative Hydro Energy Centre (AHEC) of the IIT Roorkee. In a letter to union environment minister Jairam Ramesh, Himanshu Thakkar of SANDRP dismisses the report as biased in favo
The South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People (SANDRP) a network of organisations working on issues related with water sector has rejected cumulative impact assessment of the Ganga basin hydropower projects done by the Alternative Hydro Energy Centre of the IIT Roorkee. In a letter written to Jairam Ramesh, minister of environment and forest (MoEF), Himanshu Thakkar of SANDRP says the rep
