-Tehelka Shamefully, in India, a large percentage of the population still defecates in the open. However, a village in Tamil Nadu has scripted a rare success story by becoming an Open Defecation-Free Village. Nisha Ponthathil documents how the people of Amarambedu near Chennai triumphed over habit with a little help from the civil society Twenty-nine-year-old R Karthick, a resident of Amarambedu village, situated about 65 kilometres away from Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai,...

-The Indian Express The way the graph moves tells the story of a public health disaster that has been allowed to happen: over the last 15 years, the fall and rise of the lethal, fine dust that clogs your lungs every day in the nation's capital. After the historic Supreme Court judgement in 1998 forced all public transport vehicles, an estimated 100,000, to switch to cleaner Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), the levels...

-The Hindu Business Line   Farmers across Uttar Pradesh and Punjab lament weather woes and lack of social security Consumers may be bracing themselves for rising prices of vegetables and fruits, but the unseasonal heavy showers and hailstorms through the first half of March have already dealt a significant blow to farmers across much of the northern, central and western belts. Agriculture Ministry estimates earlier this week showed that Rabi crops in about 181...

-Hindustan Times Many years ago, Jagdish Bhagwati, a very distinguished economist long before he became one of the patron saints of the NDA, published an important paper on what he called Directly Unproductive Activities or DUP. These bore a close relation to what his friend and well-known South Asia scholar, Anne Krueger, had called rent-seeking activities in some slightly earlier work. Both made the important point that the social cost of...

-The Times of India CHENNAI: The industrial sector has been taking the flak for emitting high levels of hazardous gases over the years but it might ultimately be our homes that are responsible for the highest emission of greenhouse gases. A recently published study conducted by the Centre for Ecological Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, found that the domestic sector was one of the highest contributing factors to greenhouse...