The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu has become part of the regular news in the recent past. Safety of the public has been given the utmost priority at all stages of the KKNPP construction, including from the selection of the site, designing the processes, and erection of the plant buildings and equipment. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, which has built the two Russian reactors at...

In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...

Despite sustained campaigns and legalchanges, convictions have declined steadily From the near-illegible notes scrawled by investigators at the Prasad Nagar police station, we know this: ever since 2005, the young woman who walked in through their doors last month had been stalked by her brother-in-law, given flowers and chocolate and beatings. There was the time, a bottle of rat-poison in his hand, he threatened to kill himself if she did not declare...

Renewable energy sources are attractive but in a sense, powerless. Maybe, someday we'll all live in houses with photovoltaic roof tiles but in the real world, a 1GW of solar plant will require 60 square miles of solar panels. When the demand increases, you can fire up more coal, but how will you cause the wind to blow and the sun to shine 24x7? The earth is already so disabled...

Warnings have, by and large, been discarded perhaps ever since the forbidden apple was eaten. So is the fate of the warning from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown almost on the ides of March last year, on March 11, 2011 to be precise. Nuclear apologists who earlier professed that lessons had been learnt from Chernobyl and that design modifications had been made in reactors to avert another accident are now brushing...