Three lives have been lost while several others had a narrow escape in fireaccidents that have so far claimed 16 night shelters between last year and now. In the latest incident, a night shelter was destroyed in a fire early on Saturday morning leaving a nine-year-old girl charred to death. Worse still, like every year, the state government is scrambling to put in place a winter plan for the city's...

Jagori Baske's dramatic surrender before chief minister Mamata Banerjee recently has only added to the mystery that has surrounded the dreaded Maoist for most of her life.  When exactly did she surrender? Was it before the last assembly polls? Did Kolkata police play a crucial role? How were Jagori and her husband, Maoist comrade Rajaram Soren, clad in crisp battle fatigues if they were on the run for months? And what...

Father Cedric Prakash is a human rights and peace activist based in Ahmedabad. He has campaigned for the justice of the victims of the 2002 communal violence on peril of being publicly branded as “non-Gujarati and non-Hindu” by chief minister Narendra Modi. A resident of Gujarat for nearly 40 years, Prakash is the founding director of Prashant, a centre for human rights, peace and justice. He was named Chevalier of the...

Sivadasan's five-acre farm used to be a solitary patch in Kerala's Palakkad district, with Bitter gourd, cucumber, cow peas and lady's finger growing amid a landscape dotted with paddy fields and plantations of rubber and spices.  Just five years later, more than 1.45 lakh farmers in the southern state have joined Sivadasan and started growing vegetables, reflecting a palpable shift sweeping across the Indian countryside.  "Vegetables are always more profitable than paddy,"...

Mock drill was trigger, official insensitivity drives resentment against the nuclear power project St. Lourdes Church at Idinthakarai, a fishing village located about 80 km south of the Tirunelveli town, is an important place of worship for the local people. Of late, the Church, which is over 100 years old, is in the news for a different reason: it serves as the focal point for the protests against the Kudankulam Nuclear...