Jatland may be basking in the golden glow of women medal winners at the Commonwealth Games but the average Haryanvi continues to disfavour the girl child, posting the worst gender skew in five years. The sex ratio in Haryana has skid to its lowest of 834 girls for 1,000 boys in the age group of 0-6 years in the past five years. In 2006, it was 857 girls for 1,000 boys...

ASSAM is on the brink of a movement, like the one that ended with the 1984 Assam Accord. This time the concern is not illegal immigrants but dams proposed upstream in Arunachal Pradesh. In the past year and a half people in Assam have held a number of protests. The latest one was on September 10 when Union Minister of Environm ent and Forests Jairam Ramesh visited Guwahati to consult academics,...

The youth will not take no for an answer. Five years on, the RTI comes of age. At four feet something, Santosh’s energy belies her petite frame. The school dropout was introduced to RTI through activist Arvind Kejriwal, and now, at Parivartan’s Sundar Nagri office, she holds fort, helping others acquire everything from BPL and ration cards to school admissions through RTI. Threats and attacks by local authorities who dubbed her...

Dams may have been the temples of modern India to Jawaharlal Nehru, but Uttarakhand’s BJP government has stopped work on a hydel project because priests and devotees fear it might submerge a Kali temple. The government’s surprise move on Thursday on the 400MW Alakananda project is steeped in local politics and coincides with a countrywide debate on development-versus-environment. But it also highlights how easy it has become to block power projects in...

As rubber prices soared to Rs 180 per kg, even land, which is not traditionally best suited for rubber is getting converted in Kerala, thus shrinking the area under paddy cultivation. To stop diversion of paddy area towards rubber farms, the Kerala government has decided to implement a Rs 2,111-crore central package for paddy development in Kuttanad district, major producer of rice in the state. “Procurement price of paddy is now as...