At the second-floor office of 5th Pillar, a three-year-old Chennai-based non-governmental organization (NGO), 40-year-old Vijay Anand vociferously evangelizes to a crowd of 25 people on a Saturday evening. He urges the group—a mix of students and working professionals who are there to learn about how to get information on public officials—to fight corruption and shame corrupt government workers by offering the zero- rupee note that contains the promise to neither...

Earthquakes were the deadliest natural disasters in the past decade, accounting for 60 per cent of deaths caused by such hazards, a senior United Nations official said today, stressing the importance of investing in disaster risk reduction. UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction Margareta Wahlström stated that earthquakes remain a serious threat for millions of people worldwide as eight of the most populous cities in the world are built on...

Scarcity teaches a village in Orissa how to manage its water supply Thirty-something Gulab Kunju remembers the days when she would drink milk to quench thirst because drinking water was scarce. Her village Dhaurada had three hand pumps to meet the needs of more than 120 families settled in four hamlets. Each day she would make several trips to the nearest hand pump on the outskirts of her hamlet. During summers the...

The strongest earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers. Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor or to estimate the number of dead lying among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people. International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally told the...

Roads “as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks” was a promise that Lalu Yadav had once given to the people of Bihar. Ironically, it is his rival Nitish Kumar who seems to be delivering on that front. Despite three years of floods followed by a year of drought, ‘backward and benighted’ Bihar reports a miraculous figure: 11% GDP growth, second only to Gujarat. The state’s economy has never grown so fast...