-The Hindustan Times I remember her face but not her name. She was one of the 30 people I met one winter afternoon in 2009 at Basaguda village in Chhattisgarh's Maoist-hit Bijapur district. A thin, tall woman, she stood at the edge of the group, listening attentively to her neighbour who was narrating an incident of an armed attack on the village that had left them homeless for months. When my...

-The Hindu A unique cell phone-based networking system in Chhattisgarh helps Adivasi Gonds share local news and air grievances. Deep in the jungles of Chhattisgarh, a straightforward, earthy man named Naresh Bunkar, field co-ordinator of the Adivasi Santha Manch, picks up his mobile phone and dials +918050068000, a long-distance number in Bangalore. He immediately cuts off and waits. Within seconds, he gets a call from the dialled number, and he hears a...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Admitting that charitable hospitals flout norms despite monitoring, the Maharashtra government will now set up and maintain an online real-time database in all such hospitals to make sure the indigent and economically backward citizens can avail of affordable medical services. Having issued a Government Resolution to this effect on October 22, the government will spend on setting up computer hardware and employ one 'Aarogya Mitra', under the Rajiv...

-The Business Standard A recent academic paper on probability theory shows how beliefs are influenced by interpretations of data rather than the data itself Ever since Indira Gandhi turned it into a closely-held family company - and even more so since Sonia Gandhi turned it into a brain-dead dinosaur - one of the hallmarks of the Congress party is that it often ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Whether...

-The Hindustan Times     Burning of agricultural waste in Punjab in India and Pakistan in the last one week may be the reason behind the thick smog that has engulfed entire northern India, according to new satellite images released by Nasa. Latest photographs released by US satellite agency showed hundreds of fire hot-spots (in red) across Punjab in India and Pakistan on October 27 and on November 5 confirming local pollution is not...