Chanchala Devi always wanted a house. Not a mud-and-stick hut, like her current home in this desolate village in the mineral-rich, corruption-corroded state of Jharkhand, but a proper brick-and-mortar house. When she heard that a government program for the poor would give her about $700 to build that house, she applied immediately. As an impoverished day labourer from a downtrodden caste, she was an ideal candidate for the grant. Yet she...

The contrast between the disasters, more than a quarter-century and half a world apart, could not be starker. In 1984, a leak of toxic gas at an American company’s Indian subsidiary killed thousands, injured tens of thousands more and left a major city with a toxic waste dump at its heart. The company walked away after paying a $470 million settlement. The company’s American chief executive, arrested while in India, skipped...

In most organisations, those who are the biggest funders are also the ones with the biggest say in their running. In the case of the World Health Organisation (WHO), on the face of it, there seem to be two entities making the biggest voluntary contributions, the US government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But a closer look at the list of voluntary contributors suggests that the Gates Foundation...

Says India will be one of the biggest beneficiaries ‘I am trying to bridge gap between academic work and policy making' ‘Need for honest attempt for interflow of ideas from think tanks and use them in policy making' Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Monday said that India cannot accept any international agreement without equity and insisted on equitable access to global atmospheric space. “This is a matter of survival,” he told a press...

Justice N Santosh Hegde, till this week the lok ayukta of Karnataka, a former Supreme Court judge and the son of the famous late Justice K S Hegde, who resigned from the Supreme Court of India in protest against his supersession by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, contributing to events that culminated in her imposition of national Emergency, has spoken for millions of concerned citizens across the country by quitting...