I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...

Despite its slackening industry, the common perception of West Bengal as a backward state has little substance when one looks at the facts. Most of us are conditioned to view economic development in terms of industrialisation. While industrialisation is essential for economic transformation, it is not as if economic growth is not possible without it. The sectoral structure of India's gross domestic product (GDP) and its slow transformation makes a good...

A small farmer in Maharashtra, whose high-yielding rice variety is popular in five States, is denied the benefits of his research. TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, Dadaji Khobragade of Nanded Fakir village in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra noticed yellow seeds in three spikes of a paddy stalk in his field. Intrigued by the freak harvest, he preserved the grains. He subsequently planted them in a six-foot square plot, which he covered with thorny...

An RTI applicant last week stumped State Information Commissioner (SIC) Vijay Kuvalekar when he demanded that the district collectorate provide him with copies of various Acts under the Indian Penal Code. The Public Information Officer and the Appellate Authority rejected his application. An exasperated SIC told the applicant that he could get the copies from the market. “Why do you have to move an RTI application for this?” Kuvalekar said. The...

Right to information (RTI) activists in the city have demanded the state government to invoke section 17 (3) (e) of the RTI Act, 2005, to remove Ramanand Tiwari from the post of state information commissioner (SIC), as his son owns a flat in the controversial Adarsh Housing Society in Mumbai. President of Nagrik Chetna Manch, Maj Gen (retd) SCN Jatar, president of Sajag Nagrik Manch, Vivek Velankar, Surajya Sangharsh Samiti chief...