By Somini Sengupta
AZAMGARH DISTRICT, India: When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of jewelry or land. Cities are good [...]

[Read more →]

The Biggest and probably most controversial games in history.

It’s a big day for China today. With its opening ceremony of the Beijng Olympics, it hopes to definitely settle its desired image of superpower in a world of shifting power, scarce resources, diverging trends of democracy and varying definitions of human rights.
While several world leaders will [...]

[Read more →]

The continuous attention in the media for the latest news can sometimes cause painstaking forgotten issues. West Bengal’s Cooper Camp, a ‘forgotten’ refugee camp in India, is such a forgotten story.
Coopers Camp is the sub-continent’s oldest and least-known refugee camp. A hangover from another era, it represents a major embarrassment for the progressive West Bengal [...]

[Read more →]

During his visit to India, prince Willem Alexander recently delivered a speech during Seminar ‘Water and Microfinance’ in New Delhi.
At the same time, our new Dutch Youth Representative to the United Nations, Wouter Thiebou, is getting clean and safe drinking water on the international policies agenda, while it seems at the same time a more [...]

[Read more →]

Following in the conceptual footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi, 25,000 of the world’s most marginalized poor march together along the Indian National Highway. These landless poor farmers have gathered in a mass show of non violent strength to bring the attention of the Indian Government to their pitiable plight. They have chosen to endure the loss [...]

[Read more →]

Burma is ruled by one of the worst military dictatorships in the world. This week Buddhist monks and nuns began marching and chanting prayers to call for democracy. The protests spread and hundreds of thousands of Burmese people joined in — they’ve been brutally attacked by the military regime, but still the protests are spreading.
I [...]

[Read more →]

India’s torrid economic expansion over the past five years delighted investors internationally, but the inevitable shakeouts of rapid growth are starting to rub some nerves raw at home. Thousands of Indian farmers battled police (Telegraph) in the country’s West Bengal state in March, protesting government plans to confiscate their land and turn it into a [...]

[Read more →]

Small-town India’s new middle class is negotiating globalisation and modernity in much more meaningful ways than the metropolitan middle class, says Sanjay Srivastava’s new book, titled Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India.
The book examines the middle class in globalising India through the lens of the ‘friendship magazines’ of the Hindi heartland and popular [...]

[Read more →]

In keeping with Coca-Cola’s philosophy on water stewardship and working towards improving the quality of life of the community at large, Coca-Cola India is launching a slew of water management initiatives on March 22, 2007, the World Water Day.
Read more…

[Read more →]

The Indian economy is booming — but the boom will last only as long as the vagaries of Indian democratic politics allow it to. Democracy and market reform are uneasily aligned in India today, and the additional reforms necessary to raise the lot of India’s poor masses — who have enormous voting clout — may [...]

[Read more →]