CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday asserted that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government was committed to carrying out urban renewal and municipal reforms and promised more funds to help improve quality of life in urban areas by providing better civic amenities and infrastructure. Dr. Singh was addressing the National Conference on the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) here. The Prime Minister said the Ministries of Urban Development, and...

From the bed of an intensive care unit, Samavedam Sriramachari today recalled his two decades of research that helped demystify the poison gas which caused the worst chemical disaster in human history. The Indian pathologist, who helped the world fathom how the methyl isocyanate gas that leaked from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal 25 years ago killed and harmed thouSands of people, is now himself fighting a lung disease probably...

The UPA government has come under severe criticism for trying to hurriedly pass the Land Acquisition (amendment) and the Resettlement & Rehabilitation Bill during the ongoing Parliamentary session. Both the bills have been dubbed as anti-poor as their provisions are seen to promote forced dispossession of farmers’ land as well as large scale displacement of rural people. The haste with which the two Bills are being promoted could be assessed...

In my July 2002 column and the preface to the revised and abridged version of my 1988 book, The Hindu Equilibrium, I noted the astonishing post-modern turn in Indian history, whose canonical book Imagining India by RB Inden claimed that caste was an invention of the colonial British Raj. This ran contrary to the central theme of my book that the caste system arose in ancient India in the Indo...