13 more people died due to the biting cold in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday, taking this season's toll to 81. Lucknow recorded a minimum of 3.4 degrees celsius. Bareilly was at 3.2, Allahabad and Gorakhpur were marginally warmer. The national capital Delhi shivered at 5 degrees as icy winds lashed the city. Schools in both states remain closed for another week. Further north, farmers in Punjab are among the hardest hit...

When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...

Responding to the lack of computer training in Mukteshwar’s schools, Veena Sethi, a retired Delhi University professor, set up two used personal computers in the basement of her home with the aim of bringing the basics of computing to school children. "There were no libraries, no laboratories and no computer classes. In fact, most of the schools in Mukteshwar [which is in the Nainital district of northern Uttarakhand state] had no...

Good weather conditions and the recent rains in North India have brightened the chances of a better wheat crop this year. Improvement in the cultivation per hectare of wheat and better quality seed may also help increase production. According to sources, the total wheat production of Haryana and Punjab may reach 268 lakh metric tonnes in 2010-11, compared to 256 lakh MT of the previous year. It is expected that while...

The rapid growth of global markets has not seen the parallel development of social and economic institutions to ensure balanced, inclusive and sustainable growth. Although we may not have yet reached “the end of history,” globalisation has brought us closer to “the end of geography” as we have known it. The compression of time and space triggered by the Third Industrial Revolution —roughly, since 1980 — has changed our interactions with...