After winning the Audience Choice Award at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA), I Am Kalam, a film directed by Nila Madhab Panda and produced by Smile Foundation on a child's struggle to get an education against all odds, is reportedly headed to the Buckingham Palace. Prince Charles has expressed an interest in watching the movie and has requested a special screening, a statement said. Gulshan Grover, who acts in...

Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the...

It is not often that a social security programme the size of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS - New Delhi has spent Rs 40,000 crore on it in 2010/11 alone - faces an existential moment. But, April 2011 will present one such crossroad: the end of the term of a bureaucrat widely acknowledged as the prime mover behind the five-year old scheme. Brought in six years ago to the Centre from her parent...

Bihar did not record a single stillbirth in 2008 — death of an unborn child in mother's womb during the last trimester of pregnancy (after 28 weeks' gestation). Even before you could sigh in disbelief, truth to be told that India tremendously under reports stillbirth figures. According to the sample registration survey in 2008, conducted by the registrar general's office, the country recorded eight stillbirths per 1,000 births — a highly improbable...

“How is government aggrieved if illegal commission has been closed?” The Supreme Court has declined to interfere with the rajasthan High Court judgment transferring cases of alleged corruption during the Vasundhara Raje government, being probed by a State government-appointed Commission, to the Lokayukta. A Bench of Justices D.K. Jain and H.L. Dattu dismissed a special leave petition filed by the State government challenging the High Court's order, which set aside the constitution...