Ruskin Bond is perhaps the only Indian author of English language to have created a vast wealth of children’s literature. Despite being famous, Bond is quite unassuming and does not believe in public relations and does not even have an email id! He has been awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan for his writings. He won John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial
Venkaiah Naidu is known for his plain speak and the union development minister displayed it in full measure recently at the opening address of a two-day consultation conference involving bureaucrats and municipal bodies on smart cities in New Delhi. “Everyone wants a smart city,” he said, “but are you ready for reforms?” It was as much a rhetorical question as it was one
I am not going to repeat the biblical story here; I have used this word for two giants and powerful adversaries of the AAP. The two national parties, the BJP and Congress, with decades of political existence and experience lost the election to the small and novice political force AAP. My intention here is not to write about their fall. Too much has already been written about this election. I wa
About 5.5 million tribal children are malnourished in India. According to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report, every second tribal child in India is undernourished. This is mainly because of lack of land and livelihood, poor maternal health (68.5 percent tribal mothers are anaemic) and poor care of children of women working as labourers. On
What is ‘Digital India’ and how will it benefit the common man? It will make the common man more empowered. It will bridge the gap between digital haves and digital have-nots. We need Digital India more for the poor and under-privileged people. For example, if a rickshaw puller from Bihar comes to Delhi then all his documents like BPL card, birth cert
The report of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) by Pratham Foundation confirms perhaps what we already knew instinctively; that through access to education is now near universal and dropout rates are continuously declining, the quality of education is suspect. The report reveals that near half of the children who go to school in rural India cannot read, write or do ar
The man responsible for driving urban development in Madhya Pradesh is also well versed with the ICT and has played a key role in shaping the growth of IT industry in the state. In an interaction with Governance Now, he talks about the smart city plans of the government. How do you define a smart city? Which cities in Madhya Pradesh you plan to develop under the
The RSS’s vision of Rashtranirman happens to be hazed, for the time being, by the simple and more conventional issues of bijli pani and sadak. The Delhi assembly election could be seen as an election replete with contrasts. The biggest contrast came out as the one between a grand, distant vision and more tactile issues. This Delhi election tells a contrasting narrative of desires and expe
Union chemicals and fertilizers minister Ananth Kumar is a veteran politician. He served as a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. In his home state Karnataka, he has always been a force to reckon with in the BJP, at times evoking extreme reactions within the Sangh Parivar. Kumar’s induction into the Narendra Modi cabinet was a logical conclusion to his long innings in politic
As the dust settles over the Delhi assembly elections and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) returns with an astounding victory within a year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strategists would be left wondering whether they had unwittingly contributed to the AAP victory, creating a national opposition for itself. If Modi’s electioneering and media blitzkrieg contributed to the BJP’s victory in
Here’s the big question. Can every Indian have 24/7 internet connection? Two IIT Bombay professors and a couple of their students from the departments of electronics and aerospace presented a paper in 2007 laying out an innovative and affordable way to provide top-quality wireless broadband connectivity directly to homes through tethered mini aerostats equipped with omnidirectional antenn
Digital literacy is necessary to keep millions of Indians well informed and connected. Debjani Ghosh, vice president, sales and marketing group and managing director for South Asia at Intel Corporation explains how the company is helping the nation in its journey towards digital literacy in an email interview with Praggya Guptaa. How is Intel sup
The national capital votes on Saturday for its assembly. The aggressive campaigning by all political parties came to an end at 6 pm on Thursday. Campaigning took a dramatic turn in the last phase as opinion polls gave a kind of walk over to Arvin Kejriwal-led AAP. If these opinion polls are right, the AAP will return to form government in Delhi. Other state parties and communist
As a co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the internet, Cerf is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications. In an email interaction with Governance Now, he talks about the next phase of evolution of the internet and how India should go about connecting its billion plus people. How do you see the global digi
The former head of transport department of the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi tells Governance Now why public transport gets the short shrift How did public transport become such an ignored area? Up till the early 1980s, urban transport was an irrelevant subject for any government. Three-fourths of India lived in villages. The urban vote
The issue of retaining or omitting the English language comprehension test (ELCT) from the civil services aptitude test (CSAT), which is a part of the preliminary examination (“prelims”) for the combined civil services examination, was debated hotly just about six months ago and seems to be surfacing again. After juggling with the issue for some time, the new governm
Out of 9,816,000 people who died in 2014 in India, 7 per cent succumb to cancer. According to World Health Organisation (WHO) report, cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide, it killed around 8.2 million people in 2012. February 04 is observed as World Cancer Day across the globe. Read about the cancer day here
What are the trends in information management and data storage infrastructure? The world is moving towards the flat file system or unstructured data and to address this requirement we have specific file and content solution that helps store massive amount of such data. This is what we call the content layer. Along with this we have the converged storage infrastru
So many people unemployed, yet an estimated driver shortage of 20 lakh. What explains this? India is full of such paradoxes. There are several reasons for this, but I’d like to point out a couple. One, there is no connect between academia and industry. Mostly, people go through an education for the sake of a degree. It is non-specific and does not prepare t
Some years ago while watching Karan Johar’s hyper-melodramatic take on “loving your parents” I was forced to stand up. The scene set in London was about celebrating our national symbols. Shah Rukh Khan’s son in the film, giving patriotic goose bumps to his parents, sings the national anthem, amidst all white students. Overwhelming as it was for his mother,
