After she failed in her grade ten examinations, Aarti Naik would've ended up being a domestic help like most of her classmates but chose to fight the situation she was in. Today she teaches schoolgirls from her neighbourhood for free lest they fail in their examinations and in life. Sometime in June 2003, when she received her State Secondary Certificate (SSC) examination mark sheet, Aarti Naik was crestfallen. She had failed...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

Some time before the Manmohan Singh regime imploded in the mass of corruption scandals that are currently regaling television audiences, Manish Tiwari, the Congress member of parliament and spokesperson, was participating in a televised programme on political parties and their attitudes to corruption. Someone asked why the Congress had given a parliamentary ticket to Mohammed Azharuddin, the former Indian cricket captain found guilty of match-fixing and banned for life from...

Endosulfan, the pesticide which is widely believed to be responsible for thousands of deaths, diseases and devastation, was able to save its own life largely because of India’s questionable efforts at global forums. The controversial pesticide has been in news for a long time because of its harmful effects on humans, wild life and the environment. Obviously the $100 million industry is going out of the way to defend the...

Sharad Pawar says many states had asked him not to ban the pesticide Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar is rooting for endosulfan just before the fifth Conference of Parties (COP) of the Stockholm Convention meets in Geneva from April 25 to April 30 to decide the fate of the pesticide. There seems to be a pattern in Pawar’s resistance to banning endosulfan. Replying to a question in the Lok Sabha on February...