Memories of the killer cyclone of 1999 continue to haunt Parvati Maiti every time the sky turns overcast. Today, it’s been exactly 12 years since the massive cyclone swept through the state, killing and leaving thousands homeless. However, the 52-year-old woman from Ambiki village, who lost her husband and elder son to the super cyclone, is yet to receive the compensation amount of Rs 3 lakh against the two casualties in her...

When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young bride years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives. "My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village...

-The Economist   The world’s population will reach 7 billion at the end of October. Don’t panic IN 1950 the whole population of the earth—2.5 billion—could have squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, onto the Isle of Wight, a 381-square-kilometre rock off southern England. By 1968 John Brunner, a British novelist, observed that the earth’s people—by then 3.5 billion—would have required the Isle of Man, 572 square kilometres in the Irish Sea, for its standing...

One week from now, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion. Because censuses are infrequent and incomplete, no one knows the precise date—the US Census Bureau puts it somewhere next March—but there can be no doubt that humanity is approaching a milestone. The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding...

It was once a sleepy hamlet with rolling stretches of barren land, little agricultural activity and hardly any economy to boast of. But the nuclear power project transformed Kudankulam drastically. There was a minor real estate boom, income levels rose and lifestyles changed. Today, in the place of a small vegetable shop is a market place selling a wide variety of vegetables. All that is set to be reversed.  The anti-nuclear...