India's rural innovators have proved that ordinary people are indeed capable of extraordinary inventions. Despite many constraints -- lack of education and severe cash crunch -- most of them have succeeded in using technology cost-effectively to build ingenious products. A washing-cum-exercise machine, hand operated water lifting device, portable smokeless stove, automatic food making machine, solar mosquito killer, shock proof converter, a floating toilet soap are few of the products on display...

‘No place for colonial mentality in democratic country governed by rule of law' The Supreme Court on Monday deprecated the “colonial mentality” of the police in using third degree methods and said such outlawed practices had no place in a democratic country governed by the rule of law. A Bench comprising Justice Markandey Katju and Justice T.S. Thakur, dealing with a case of policemen using third degree methods and cutting off the...

Malaria kills around 205,000 people in India each year, more than 13 times the estimate made by the World Health Organization, researchers said on Thursday. WHO, the public health arm of the UN, estimates that approximately 15,000 people a year die from malaria in India, and 100,000 adults worldwide. The researchers called for both figures to be urgently revised so they do not hurt funding for prevention, rapid diagnosis and treatment. “If you...

If some are still wondering why the census cannot blank out caste, their answer came BoBbing in a country boat today. Bill Gates, who usually crosses continents on his $45-million private jet, took the boat that shuddered in the swift waters of the Kosi to reach a remote Bihar village that had hardly ever seen a district official. One of his first questions was if caste divisions in the country’s backward hinterland...

THE BROTHERS are named Sunny Deol and BoBby Deol. But their similarity to the Bollywood Deol family ends there. Two-year-old ‘BoBbeed yol’, as he is called, has straggly, light brown hair and loose skin forms wrinkles on his stickthin limbs. He squats listlessly on a cement parapet, watching older boys play. His elder brother, five-year-old ‘Sunneed yol’, is malnourished too, and sick with pneumonia — for the nth time in...