A FEW SLEEPY villages in the hills, about an hour’s drive from Pune, are suddenly buzzing with activity. Lavasa Corporation, a subsidiary of the Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), is spending Rs 140,000 crore to ‘clean out’ these villages (read tribals and marginal farmers) and build a world-class city in its place. Those pushing the project argue that urban India, bursting at its seams, just cannot cope with the large-scale migration from...

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...

Each night, as temperatures continue to plunge and Delhi shivers through its coldest winter in the last decade, a few more people lose their lives on its streets. The people who succumb to the cold include rickshaw-pullers, balloon-sellers and casual workers, the footloose underclass of dispossessed people who build and service the capital city of the country and yet are forced to sleep under the open sky. They die because...

India has asked the World Health Organisation to explain media reports that the A (H1N1) influenza is a false pandemic. Making an intervention at the WHO Executive Board meeting, now on in Geneva, Union Health and Family Welfare Secretary K. Sujatha Rao said such reports were adversely impacting the public health measures being taken by countries. She called for greater transparency in the terms and conditions on which international manufacturers were...

The United Nations today launched a pilot project to provide fuel-efficient stoves to some 150,000 women in Sudan and Uganda to cut the risks of murder, rape and other violence they face in gathering firewood, while at the same time protecting the environment. The Safe Access to Firewood and Alternative Energy in Humanitarian Settings (SAFE) stoves initiative organized by the World Food Programme (WFP) and other UN agencies, will be...