-Agence France-Presse Nekpur: With both hands holding the basket of human excrement on her head, widowed grandmother Kela walks through a stream of sewage, up a mound of waste and then dumps the filth while cursing. "Nobody even pays us a decent wage!" she spits as she rakes mud and rubbish over her newly deposited pile, one of several she drops in the course of her working day cleaning toilets as a...
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What Shunglu report? It’s plain anger -Ramaswamy R Iyer
-The Hindu The intention behind the move to make the CAG a multimember body is not to activate the Shunglu Committee’s report but a desire to clip the auditor’s wings During the last few days there have been many comments on the report that the government of India was considering a proposal to make the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) a multimember body. The move has been widely seen as...
More »From plastic portable loos to Sanitary Bonds, India needs a latrine policy-V Raghunathan
-The Economic Times After Mahatma Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh is the only national leader to be genuinely concerned that 65 years after Independence, some 600 million Indians in the 21st century continue to use open skies as their latrines. While Lee Kuan Yew continues to exhort Singaporeans to have cleaner loos, our ministry of railways thinks depositing human excreta all along the country's length and breadth, including deep into the cities -...
More »ACs, refrigerators may get more expensive -Nitin Sethi
-The Times of India The cost of air-conditioners and refrigerators could go up considerably starting next summer if the US and other rich countries force a decision at the UN climate talks in November at Doha, to order a global ban on existing refrigerant gases and replace them with costly though relatively more climate-friendly alternatives. One of the alternatives being proposed is produced jointly by DuPont and Honeywell, two US-based multinationals, and...
More »The New Wave Of Energy-Yashodhara Dasgupta
-Business World Wind, water and the sun can help India cut dependence on coal and gas For India, energy security has never seemed more real, more urgent than now. Forty per cent of the country’s 1.2-billion populace is yet to have access to electricity. Even those getting grid supply suffer poor quality of power. Towns see power cuts more than half the day. The country’s energy deficit, according to the Central Electricity...
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