Delhi NGOs initiate a process to survey the city's homeless people and reach welfare schemes to them. IN the narrow lanes of Khari Baoli, Asia's largest wholesale spice and grocery market in the crowded Old Delhi area near the Red Fort, labourers grapple with heavy sacks of grain, pulses, and so on as they load them on to wooden trolleys or unload them from trucks. There is no room for...

The untiring champion of the downtrodden and civil rights and former IAS official (1956 batch) of the Andhra Pradesh cadre S R Sankaran passed away on Thursday in Hyderabad. A bachelor, Sanakaran was 76. Though retired in 1992, he never called off his mission to defend the rights of the marginalised sections. Be it government, Maoists, civil rights organisations, Supreme Court or Planning Commission of India, his services were most sought...

In our frantic search for solutions to our water crisis, we tend to overlook the self-evident relationship between water, food, and energy. It is still not too late. As my colleague Tony Allan, a Stockholm Water Prize laureate says so pithily, the three are the corners of a triangle with politics and emotion at its center. About 80 percent of accessible freshwater in Asia is used for agriculture; the rest...

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which has revitalised the rural landscape across the country, stands diminished in the land of its birth, Rajasthan, hijacked and held to ransom by vested interests and stripped of its backbone of an open social audit. As the Andhra experience has shown, there is one ingredient that can bring back its vitality: institutionalising citizen audits. But, is the Rajasthan government up to...

“India is Shining” in many ways, but the major hiccups in the run up to the Commonwealth Games (CWG), which opened on October 3 in New Delhi, highlight India's serious problems. Despite the colourful display of India's arts and culture at the grand opening ceremony, the frantic last minute interventions —including enlisting the Army (who did a remarkable job) to help with the final preparations — reveal the gross inefficiencies...