Nature serves well even when rivers run dry. Students of Government Polytechnic-Nirsa who recently unearthed four artesian wells in a rocky stretch of Dhanbad, will surely vouch for the natural source of water that promises succour as another arid summer looms. The nine final-year civil engineering (diploma) students, under the guidance of senior lecturer of the institute Suresh Prasad Yadav, spotted the four wells in Baliapur block of the district — one...

In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can be devastatingly polite: when Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari, who has a commercial interest in agriculture, wrote him a doomsday letter on the dire state of agriculture under UPA rule, Dr. Singh took a month to reply, but when he did, it was to tell the BJP president in excruciating detail about the rise in agricultural production during his tenure in office, which compares...

Despite sustained campaigns and legalchanges, convictions have declined steadily From the near-illegible notes scrawled by investigators at the Prasad Nagar police station, we know this: ever since 2005, the young woman who walked in through their doors last month had been stalked by her brother-in-law, given flowers and chocolate and beatings. There was the time, a bottle of rat-poison in his hand, he threatened to kill himself if she did not declare...

‘It has become a toothless organisation, which hasmade no difference to neglect of the river' Claiming that the National Ganga River Basin Authority has become a toothless organisation which has made no change to the government's neglect of the national river, three of its non-governmental members have submitted their resignations to the Prime Minister, chairperson of the body. “In three years of the NGRBA's existence, we have only had two meetings,” said...