-PTI   The first unit of the Kundankulam nuclear power project is expected to start generating electricity in the next 40 days, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office V Narayanasamy said on Monday. He said the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) officials were at the Kudankulam project site and inspecting the plant. "The first reactor of 1000 MW will be operational within 40 days from today," Narayanasamy told reporters here. He said the...

What better elixir than pure water? Thanks to Naandi, a safe drinking water programme, 3,90,536 households in rural areas across four Indian states are benefited.  Naandi, headquartered in Hyderabad, is a not-for-profit organization which works with governing bodies in rural areas, including Karnataka, to provide clean drinking water to the poor. So what really is their modus operandi? It is essentially a community-run programme where the local governing body or gram...

Seven months after the National Integration Council (NIC) meeting in September “discussed and dumped” the National Advisory Council (NAC)-drafted ‘Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparation) Bill, civil society activists from across the country representing more than 50 organisations came together to pronounce the Bill as “dead.” They also demanded that the Union government come up with a new draft of the Bill focused on “making public...

The Manipur government has taken a serious view of the recruitment of child soldiers by some underground organisations. Talking to Naharolgi Thoudang , a vernacular newspaper, G. Gaikhangam, Home Minister, said that since mature and educated persons would not like to join insurgent outfits, the frustrated groups were targeting children. He had directed Director-General of Police Ratnakar Bralal to keep all police stations in the State on alert. He said it was...

Arundhati has got it all wrong—the facts speak out against her romantic notions of the tribals’ fight Nirad C. Chaudhary wrote in The Continent of Circe that India’s tribals were mainly found in hill forests. This was because, he reasoned, they had been chased there by the invading Aryans, who displaced them from their river plains. In an essay published in this magazine (Capitalism: A Ghost Story, March 26), Arundhati Roy...