-Times of India Sunday Times had on April 1 reported about Assam man Jadav Payeng's unparalleled feat of single-handedly growing a forest spread over 550 hectares on a sandbar in the Brahmaputra over 30 years. Following that, Jawaharlal Nehru University decided to have him over on Earth Day. On Sunday, Payeng was honoured at a function organized by the School of Environmental Sciences, JNU, for his remarkable achievement at a public...

What better elixir than pure water? Thanks to Naandi, a safe drinking water programme, 3,90,536 households in rural areas across four Indian states are benefited.  Naandi, headquartered in Hyderabad, is a not-for-profit organization which works with governing bodies in rural areas, including Karnataka, to provide clean drinking water to the poor. So what really is their modus operandi? It is essentially a community-run programme where the local governing body or gram...

-The Telegraph   The New York Times has reported that Wal-Mart, the US-based retail giant, hushed up an internal investigation sometime after the company was told of a bribery campaign to obtain licences and facilitate rapid expansion in Mexico. Some of the alleged instances of bribery are certain to ring a bell in India where it is not too difficult to bend rules for a price. The New York Times said its “examination...

The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) of the Maharashtra Police has sought the Bombay High Court’s intervention and redressal in the case of a special judge in Kolhapur who has ordered acquittals in 41 of the 45 cases she has presided over since 2007.   The ACB is not in agreement with 31 of those 41 acquittals and has already challenged 27 of them. It has also urged the high court to probe the...

Arundhati has got it all wrong—the facts speak out against her romantic notions of the tribals’ fight Nirad C. Chaudhary wrote in The Continent of Circe that India’s tribals were mainly found in hill forests. This was because, he reasoned, they had been chased there by the invading Aryans, who displaced them from their river plains. In an essay published in this magazine (Capitalism: A Ghost Story, March 26), Arundhati Roy...