The North East Students’ Organisation today demanded special constitutional status for the region to thwart the threats of increasing Chinese aggression and unabated influx from Bangladesh. NESO, the umbrella body of all student groups in the region, will soon send delegates to New Delhi to highlight the problems and hold a meeting of the Northeast MPs Forum to draw the Centre’s attention. NESO chairman Sammujjal Bhattacharyya told reporters here that...

“Wherever there is a lamp, there is darkness below it,” said Bava Bhalekar, a fisherman and local leader in this village roughly a hundred miles south of Mumbai. “The tragedy is that while our village has this project, we ourselves don’t have electricity.” “This project” is the power plant that Enron built. A decade after Enron withdrew from the project, the Indian government and two Indian companies are promising to...

People in the southern state of Kerala are the heaviest drinkers in India, and sales of alcohol are rising fast. The BBC's Soutik Biswas examines why. Jacob Varghese says he began drinking when he was nine years old, sipping on his father's unfinished whisky and brandy in glass tumblers. It's a terrifying story of a descent into alcoholism for this 40-year-old health inspector. At school, he consumed cheap local liquor. He...

Spiralling prices of pulses have shown India’s dependence on imports. Pulses are integral to India’s diet but not its food policy. As a result, supply cannot meet demand. What are the consequences and solutions? Surendra Nath has switched to eating grass-pea, though he knows it is not good for health. But so is tobacco, he argues. He cannot do without pulses and pigeon-pea selling at Rs 100 a kg is beyond...

Nearly 2 lakh farmers committed suicide in India since 1997. The share of big five states accounted for 1,22,823 suicides in this 12 year period. The data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau points out that 16,196 farmers in India ended their life in 2008. K Nagaraj, an economist, in his report Farmers' suicides in India: Magnitude, Trends and Spatial Patterns, says, "The title to land was taken as the...