Hot water; hotter tempers
On April 10, a hot sunny day, Chennai’s Chepauk stadium became a fortress. Yellow barricades, armed policemen and security vans surrounded the venue. The Indian Premier League was in town, and the Chennai
Week (Kochi)
-
Zooming pride
The anxiety at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre was palpable. As the countdown ended, ISRO's chairman G. Madhavan Nair and his team could hardly believe their eyes. ISRO's pride was skyrocketing. Despite their optimism, it was a nail-biting launch when Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) lifted off with 10 satellites from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on April 28.
-
Last Straw
Suicides continue in the land of white gold. It has been 8 two months since Finance Minister P. Chidambaram announced a Rs 60,000-crore loan waiver for farmers. It was meant to prevent debt-ridden ryots from committing suicide. But in Vidarbha, where a large number of cotton farmers have committed suicide, the script has not changed.
-
Drought? Or floods!
For the first time, the meteorological department will give probability estimates of drought and excess rainfall for the country as part of its much-awaited April forecast of the southwest monsoon. The department will continue to stick to a new technique it used last year for forecasting the monsoon though it led to predictions that turned out to be way off.
-
Roofs of sand
Muniyamma, 30, and her family survived the tragic Boxing Day of 2004. But its aftermath has left her a widow and her four children fatherless. Her husband Pazhanivel, 38, immolated himself as the district administration tried to evict tsunami refugees from a temporary shelter in Kadambadi, near Nagapattinam.
-
Shot, not drop
Going, going, almost gone. But never quite. It's a pattern that's repeating itself with an ugly regularity. Just as Mumbai begins to hope that it is finally getting rid of the spectre of polio, a case pops up in some slum. And it is back to square one, with renewed mass immunisation drives, door-to-door rounds and mop up programmes.
-
Adopt a tiger?
The decline in tiger population is alarming ('Feline worries', March 9). Poachers will not rest till the last of the big cats is killed and its parts are sold in the market. Such is their greed.
-
Andhra Pradesh now in high growth trajectory
Andhra Pradesh has been galloping ahead on the road to progress and prosperity at incredible speed in the last four years.
-
Arise and utilise
The world is slowly I moving towards a crisis in the food sector. The good news is that India on its own can find a solution to it. It is the time to transform ourselves into a food bowl for the rest of the world. But there are certain issues to be tackled before we become one.
-
No gain for us, just pain
The Union Minister for Panchayati Raj, Mani Shankar Aiyar, was recently in Nagpur to attend a conference. He volunteered to visit Koljhari, Bodhbadhan and Waiphad villages that witnessed many farmer suicides. At Waiphad, he met with a group of farmers and farm labourers who were eager to talk to him.
-
Myth and reality
The National Democratic Alliance government did it-undermining the autonomy of a scientific department called the Archaeological Survey of India. The United Progressive Alliance has compounded it by withdrawing a scientific body's opinion on a matter on which it is eminently competent, and statutorily obliged, to give its view.