The passport office in Hyderabad reported the highest number of passport applications recorded in Indian history (at least 450,000) and it expects an increase of 15-20% this year Jamuna Kunta sits stiffly in a plush red chair at the Hyderabad press club, holding her head proudly erect as she quietly recounts the events leading to her husband’s suicide in Dubai. A farmer from Karimnagar, a rural district in Andhra Pradesh, her husband...

Gary Singh’s abduction ordeal illustrates the dangers faced by those who rely on smugglers to make their way overseas One day in 2006, 18-year-old Gubachan “Gary” Singh, an illegal immigrant in Manila, Philippines, was on his way to work when he was approached by four stocky Filipinos. One pulled out a gun, pressing the barrel into the small of his back, while another blindfolded him and shoved him into a van....

While, the threats of a nuclear fall-out, borne out of a tragedy that happened in the Fakushima Nuke Plant in Japan, started a debate about the positives and negatives of nuclear energy. The media completely ignored the protests and the cries that were being carried out (in fact, for the last 10 to 15 years) in Northern Kerala as well as Southern Karnataka to ban the Pesticide Endosulfan. Perhaps, after the...

Breaking away from the two-storey norm for school buildings, the Education department has commissioned the construction of four-storey schools. The move is aimed at accommodating “more children in the schools” and fighting the shortage of land in the Capital. A senior official in the Education department told Newsline, “We have asked the construction agency to build schools that have more capacity. We are asking them to increase the storeys to three, or...

Expressing disappointment with a Supreme Court order that reversed a Madhya Pradesh High Court judgment on rehabilitation and resettlement of adult sons of the Omkareshwar dam displaced people, the Madhya Pradesh unit of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) on Thursday said it would file a review plea. “These cases were filed by the Madhya Pradesh government against High Court orders that favoured proper rehabilitation under the land-for-land policy for dam-displaced people,”...