When the Gyandoot project won the prestigious Stockholm Challenge Award in 2001, it was the first e-governance initiative that caught the attention of the whole nation. Dr Rajesh Rajora, the then district magistrate of Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh, became the e-governance champion of the nation. But a decade later no one is talking about the project or the champion behind its success. It is
India’s financial capital, Mumbai, experienced yet another terrorist attack today that initial estimates say killed at least 20. Terrorists detonated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in three separate locations of the city almost simultaneously. The first two blasts occurred at around 6:55 pm, one in a jewelry market and one in a business district in southern Mumbai. The third
The planning commission’s efforts to make a more participatory plan have received wide coverage. Its work with civil society organisations; its dedicated website, backed by a Facebook page—all these have been written about. This article explains what was done and how. In the last decade, fewer citizens, especially Gen Y, have had to remember that India still follows five-yea
Just as it went after Team Anna for daring to question the government on its will to fight corruption vis-à-vis the Lokpal bill, a good section of the English media is now cross with the
A large number of grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge practices have been scouted through the Honey Bee Network. And yet, many everyday life problems still remain unresolved. The list below gives an idea of some such unsolved problems which are in need of urgent solution. We have to parameterise the problems, contextualise them and then pose a national challenge to address them in
An 11-page note dated May 9, prepared by attorney general Goolam E Vahanvati, has all you want to know about the exemption of the central bureau of investigation (CBI) from the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. CBI had sent its request for exemption from the RTI Act to the Department of personnel and training (DoPT) which forwarded it to the department of legal affa
One of the most important characteristic features of innovation eco system emerging in India is that lot of good ideas are found in small institutions in small towns. The connect between the real life problem and the pursuit of their solution seems quite high in such places. In Gujarat, the cooperation between SRISTI’s techpedia.in and Gujarat Technical University has une
Atithi devo bhavah (Guest is God), for me, hold true as long as guests come for a short stay - unlike this distant cousin of mine from Bokaro, who had to stay with me for almost a month trying to land a Delhi University (DU) admission. I had no recollections of who she was and how we were related, but I was told that I had to take her around Delhi for four weeks. DU, after a
In recent years, specifically after the civil nuclear deal with the US, India seemed to have emerged with a validated nuclear identity and was seen as being on the right side of the nuclear regime. This was a result of intense negotiations and particularly a great deal of effort put in by the George W Bush administration that not only acknowledged India’s so-called “responsible nucl
With the increasing penetration of the internet connectivity in India, the question of protecting children from exposure to harmful web content and web predators is becoming important here too. To this end, governments and international organisations have adopted a mechanism called child online protection (COP) to ensure cyber-security for children and prevent them from cyber-bullying.&nb
It happened in 1975 and 1989, and it has happened once again. Corruption has emerged as the common denominator binding the agents of change. Each of the leaders of the ongoing anti-corruption movement has worked extensively on some other cause: Anna Hazare on rural development and Arvind Kejriwal on direct democracy, for example. But it was people’s anguish against the widespread
Outsourcing is as old as – wait, let me get my researcher to check that out for you. Ancient civilisations didn’t think twice before getting neighbouring civilisations to build irrigation canals, for instance, in return for sharing the benefits of farming. If you think about it, getting somebody else to do your work cannot be a modern concept. The caveman who hired a smarter caveman
Kapil Sibal’s two-part article in the Hindustan Times (‘A free-floating entity’ and ‘Up the garden path’) trashing Team Anna’s version of the Lokpal Bill is breathtaking in
There is a sinister plan hatched by the Congress party to implicate Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in a web of legal cases relating to 2002 communal violence and some alleged police encounter cases. Accordingly, the Congress party led central government is working overtime to implicate, dethrone and arrest the popularly elected chief minister of Gujarat sometime between now and October th
Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had rare words of praise for his cabinet colleague when he extolled power minister Sushilkumar Shinde for the highest capacity addition of 10,462 MW between April 2010 and February 2011. In an interview with Sweta Ranjan, Shinde discusses how he plans to deliver “power to all” by nex
The National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) was established in May, 2002 with a vision to establish itself as a centre of excellence by leveraging private sector resources through the public-private partnership mode for the spread of e-governance. The national taskforce on IT and software development set up in 1998 first came up with the idea of establishing an institute in coll
Let`s face the odorous truth. India is not going to meet its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of turning `open defecation free` (ODF) by 2015. Not by 2020 and not even years beyond. And this is not "vested ramblings" from donor agencies like the World Bank, UNICEF or Water Aid, that have been critical of the rural development ministry administered subsidy-driven total sanita
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in an unenviable position. He has spent seven years safe in the knowledge that everybody knows he is not his own man. He has remained largely a spectator as his party president has run a super cabinet of sorts and many of his cabinet colleagues their independent fiefdoms. His first term was remarkable for his singular assertion on the India-US civil nucl
A high-level political commitment is an imperative for pushing forward the e-governance drive in the country. ICT projects in the country are as old as two to three decades. However, successive governments have paid mere lip service to creating a conducive ICT ecology in the country. The developed countries, which invested in ICT and other emerging technologies much before the others in
The Constituent Assembly and late Dr BR Ambedkar worked tirelessly to give shape to the Indian constitution promising us liberty, equality, rule of law and peaceful existence. The constitution was made to be a self-contained document setting out the fundamental rights, the directive principles of state policy, the constitutional plan for the separation of powers amongst different organs of gove
