-Livemint Is it really smart to create smart Cities? Or should we reverse our thinking to concentrate on making smart villages? New Delhi: What is smarter: building smart Cities or smart villages? In 1967, I was born in a village called Islampur in Nautan block near Bettiah town in the West Champaran district of Bihar. My father soon got a job at the Heavy Engineering Corporation Ltd (HEC) in Ranchi, and our...

-DNA India's rising affluence and water profligacy could trigger a food crisis very soon At first blush, there is a lot to be cheerful about. India's index of industrial production has resumed its climb. Stalled projects are being dusted and revived. There is a good chance that employment figures, too, will begin rising by the end of the next quarter. Then there is more good news. Per capital GDP (Gross Domestic Product)...

-The Guardian Men are setting off to find work in Cities, and women are being left holding the sickle - how can we help them? "I can see the strain when I go back to the farms," says Palagummi Sainath. "Women have always done the bulk of work in agriculture, but post-2008, things have changed. There's been a male exodus, and the roles that men were doing in agriculture are now...

-The Hindu The Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award 2014 sought to recognise projects that work towards improving the urban conditions of communities in Delhi We know what's going wrong, and we ask the right questions; questions which crop up while our car drives down narrow roads with broken street lights, landfills spilling over with waste we have created from nothing, and slums we cannot really imagine the insides of. Our city is...

-India Today Delhi attracts a bad name for its crime, traffic snarls and governance, but statistics generated by an international survey reveal that the national capital fares well in many ways when compared to other Cities like London, New York, Tokyo, Istanbul and Berlin. Delhi's performance across a number of indicators was compared to these Cities in terms of economy, population, society, governance, density, green space, environment and transport during the study...