-Hindustan Times Dehradun: Digamber Negi, 37-year-old farmer in picturesque Doon Dwara village on the border of Dehradun-Tehri Garhwal districts, is cursing his fate after monkeys barged into his field a week ago and destroyed vegetable crop. Like Negi, several other villagers have similar plight to share. The village has a population of 320 people and they are dependent only on agriculture. Villagers complain that in the past one decade or so, attacks by...

-The Hindu Business Line Sangrur and Samrala: In normal times, the grain mandi of Samrala is abuzz with the hum of agrarian commerce. These days, however, it lies virtually vacant, with only a handful of farmers coming to sell their produce. Joginder Singh Sahni says that usually the mandi is full of wheat and rice farmers selling their goods. Commission agents and other links on the commercial chain add to the...

-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy As one of the world’s largest rural connectivity endeavours, the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project has been the subject of immense policy interest for the potential it holds to deliver high speed broadband internet to rural India. The building of infrastructure on a scale of this kind was acknowledged as an audacious move owing to the nature of transformation that this could...

-Hindustan Times Water management should be at the heart of all smart city planning. While there is a lot of emphasis on transportation and infrastructure development, water management remains limited to treatment of waste water, quality monitoring, and smart metering in the government’s smart cities strategy. No clear plans have emerged on how smart cities are to be linked with their water catchments to ensure sustainable provision of water. More clarity is...

-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy In keeping with the spirit of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, the Union government had, in 2004, introduced a pre-legislative consultative policy for public policymaking. In July 2004, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, which rode to power on the twin slogans of development and good governance, launched a website, MyGov.in, to push forward its mandate of participatory governance. In...