Last summer, about 150 families of Kachan village in Jharkhand’s Palamu district decided to pool funds to repair their only community tube well. A drought, the worst in many years, had dried up two ponds; there were no wells around; and the tube well had been dysfunctional for a year. It took a lot of hardship and one whole month for them to put together what the mechanic had asked...

With 130-140 million Indians likely to move to cities in the next decade and an equal number in the one after that, the development of urban India represents the biggest challenge you can think of -- in the next two decades, India will have to create as many new cities as it created in the last several hundred years. Alternately, the existing cities which are home to around 285 million people...

In a thrust to provide sustained support to life-saving innovations in India and around the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is placing new emphasis on innovations that effect social and cultural change to bring down the unacceptably high death rates for children under five years of age in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “A lot of times,” Melinda French Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and co-founder of...

In the course of a speech at a public event on the eve of Women’s Day, Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan gave voice to his views on the victims of rape. “Due regard must be given to their personal autonomy since in some cases the victim may choose to marry the perpetrator or choose to give birth to a child conceived through forced intercourse,” he said in his address...

Technology is helping public sector banks find customers in rural India. This is part of the Centre’s efforts to include villages in the organized financial system; to ensure they are not cheated of their wages. Pilots show promise   The current state of rural banking in the country is poor. A recent report, by the National Sample Survey Organization, revealed that 51.4 per cent of the 89.3 million total farmer households in...