Kanak Dixit: We have with us Aruna Roy, from Devdungri village in Rajasthan, who has, among other things, been able to take the Right to Information (RTI) from janasunuwais, or public hearings at the village level, all the way to national legislation that encompasses all of India. It is a movement that is truly global in scale. Aruna, a question that has been troubling me quite a bit in the context...
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India shuts aid groups involved in nuke protests
-AP India has shut down three aid organizations it says were diverting foreign funds toward rallying protests against a Russian-built nuclear plant in the south, but one group on Saturday denied any involvement in the protests while another said its efforts were entirely homegrown. Activists opposed to an expansion of India's atomic energy portfolio argue that Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster caused by a massive earthquake and tsunami last March showed that such...
More »Food safety: soapy milk, toxic apples
-The Financial Express Bhim can't understand what he's done wrong. Before dawn every day he joins hundreds of wholesale traders at Delhi's Azadpur Mandi, a sprawling, chaotic market where trucks blare Bollywood music, porters haul huge brown sacks of fruit and vegetables and hawkers ply tea and cigarettes. His own trade is in rosy red apples, laced with calcium carbide. Bhim says he's been adding chemicals to his apples for years to artificially ripen...
More »UIDAI data centre: 2,000 sq ft room with digital fortress, ‘demilitarised zone’ by Saritha Rai
-The Indian Express Inside a nondescript building in the eastern part of Bangalore stands a server farm, a cluster of computers. It is a building without a sign and visitors are strictly forbidden. In this building sits the data centre of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Location of the centre: “somewhere in Whitefield suburbs”, is all UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani would tell this newspaper. The centre forms the back support of...
More »Fukushima: Fear Only The Irrational by Nathan Myhrvold
It would be grave folly to recoil from the N-option, our safest Nuclear Is Clear The world needs cheap energy and, as of now, nuclear plants are the most efficient means to that end Switching to fossil fuel sources will add to global warming. In extremis, the oceans could boil away. The lesson from Fukushima is no worse than that tsunamis are a danger to everything in their path *** After the...
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