Huge investments, the emergence of media conglomerates and their explosive growth have brought into focus new considerations that guide professional media decisions, Vice-President and Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Hamid Ansari said here on Wednesday. “Today, the demands of professional journalists are carefully balanced with the interests of owners and stakeholders of media companies and their cross media interests. The interplay of these conflicting demands is evident and [a] subject of...

The BBC's Chris Morris travels to the main source of the Ganges river to find out why the glaciers are melting. As the first light of dawn lit up the snow-covered mountain peaks, we trekked through a barren landscape 4,000 metres up in the Indian Himalayas, heading for the Gangotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges. About 2km from our destination, we passed a rock inscribed with the...

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (2005) differs from the other poverty alleviation measures in two significant respects. Where most welfare programmes cast the state in the role of benefactor offering handouts to the poor, the NREGS is built around notions of citizenship and entitlement. Secondly, the NREGS also facilitates disclosure by means of regular social audits. These audits, mandated to be done by the Gram Sabhas, are intended to...

The philosophy of self-aggrandisement defies social logic. Seven leading banks in the United States of America had last year incurred an aggregate loss of $82 billion; the chief executive officers of these banks nonetheless claimed and collected annual bonus to the extent of $38 billion. The economy might lie in ruins; that did not distract sharks from zooming in on their prey. Our corporate sector has shaped itself in the...

The United Nations’ Human Development Report of 2009 paints an idyllic picture of migrations. THE recently released United Nations Development Report-2009, titled “Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development”, presents a strong case for governments all over the world to encourage human mobility. Migrations, including those of low-skilled workforce, pay dividends all round, the report says. However, it does not quite attempt to seriously understand why people migrate, sometimes subjecting themselves...