-The Sunday Indian  When I first heard about two journalists battling for life after returning from a reporting assignment in the Abujmarh jungles of Chattisgarh, from a journalist friend, I was left unmoved. In journalistic circles, while we haven't yet lost on our emotions, it's a proud feeling to see a fellow journalist excel at reportage from an inaccessible corner, especially when the reporter is still a cub in the field....

-The Hindu On May 5 this year, Tarun Sehrawat, a photographer with Tehelka, sent me a link to his most recent photo-essay on Abujmard, a Maoist-controlled area in Chhattisgarh. Tarun and I met on assignment in Dantewada in summer 2010 and had stayed in touch. A month-and-half later, last Friday, I attended his funeral after a fever he contracted in Abujmard proved fatal. Tarun died of cerebral malaria; he was 22. I came...

By stopping social security pensions, the Karnataka government has put the lives of over 10 lakh poor in peril. Naveen Basavaraj Kuntoji is nine years old and suffers from cerebral palsy. His movements are greatly restricted, and it looks like he is in great pain every time he valiantly wills his body to do something. When he is hungry, he slowly lifts his hand and points to his mouth. When this...

-DNA Slamming private educational institutes that often use RTI for accessing the question papers of various examinations and making it public for their commercial gains, the Delhi high court said sundry information, unrelated to transparency and accountability, should not be allowed to be MISused or abused. A division bench of acting chief justice A K Sikri and justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw said this while setting aside the order of the Central Information...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...