-The Telegraph A day after land protests rocked Nagri, work at the construction site of three premier educational institutions stalled on Thursday even as villagers demanding “return” of their fertile land blocked the arterial Ranchi-Patratu road a kilometre away, disrupting Hazaribagh-bound traffic from the capital throughout the day. A 100-strong mob, comprising mostly women, used a crane belonging to a contractor, to block the vital artery from 9am. Even heavy rain failed...

The railway ministry is helpless about the discomfort of railway passengers in reserved compartments who are outnumbered by passengers without tickets or with tickets meant for unreserved compartments   Last month, my friend’s daughter went on a trip to Corbett Park, which was organised by a Pune-based nature trail group. Although they had booked a Second Class (ordinary) reserved compartment, most of the 30-hour journey was spent in utter discomfort, with people...

-The Telegraph On a full-attendance day at a business process outsourcing centre in a village in Uttar Pradesh, 40 boys and girls work on computers, each of their desktops powered by rooftop solar panels that turn sunlight into electricity. Their workplace, a two-storey building, is the only structure in Sonari, a village of about 1,700 people and located about 50km from Lucknow on the road to Sitapur, where electricity is guaranteed nine...

-Down to Earth   Buy an Indian breed from Australia In June last year, we visited Malaysia on the invitation of the country’s oldest and most active consumer action group, The Consumer Association of Penang, to study the livestock production systems and to advise on how these can be transformed into more sustainable and less industrial farming systems. The past 40 years of aggressive industrial growth in Malaysia has seen small-scale peasant agriculture and...

-The Hindu A definite acknowledgement of the potential of Aadhar for public service delivery, and especially for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) by Bharat Bhatti, Jean Drèze, and Reetika Khera in their article “Experiments with Aadhaar” (editorial page, The Hindu, June 27, 2012), is a small step for Aadhaar, but a giant leap for the authors! Process re-engineering in government is never easy, there is enormous resistance both...