After having been beaten black and blue by Team Anna, the Congress party and the government are finally waking up to take the Gandhian on even as media managers in the party have so far not come out actively against the anti-corruption crusaders. While a senior Congress leader made it clear that party chief Sonia Gandhi is unlikely to reply to the publicly distributed letter of Anna Hazare which complains against...

Extreme poverty and clamour for firewood have forced some people in Nayagram into extreme occupations. One such is gathering kolmipoka, an insect with medicinal value After walking almost 30km along rutted roads since the morning, middle-aged Bonchu Nayek returns to his humble home, a two-room hut, as darkness descends on Nayagram—one of West Bengal’s poorest villages—with his day’s earning of Rs10. Nayek, whose forefathers were hunters, belongs to the Lodha-Sabar tribe. With...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

Recent actions of some senior BJP leaders hint at an understanding between the Congress and the main opposition at the leadership level. THE Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) credentials and commitment as the principal opposition party of the country have been repeatedly questioned in the past seven years, the period in which the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has held the reins of power at the Centre. Recent developments in Parliament...

While other Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Ministers are in the limelight for all the wrong reasons, Jayant Patil is trying to make a difference in Maharashtra. Divested of his finance portfolio which went to Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, Mr. Patil, now Rural Development Minister, has embarked on an ambitious programme of tree plantation and rural sanitation, combined with planned development of villages for the first time. In a whirlwind tour...