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Going beyond home
I began working in Mumbai (then Bombay) as a young woman of 20. My workplace was safe, but I had ...
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Land grab on the banks
OVER the past two years, I have had the opportunity to meet with district magistrates (DMs) and chief development officers ...
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Rise of individualism
MANY claim that we are entering an era which marks the end of ideologies and the death of “isms”. Communism ...
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Marking territory
Dogs do it. Mark territory. So do humans. The methods differ. The objective is the same. To protect one’s turf by ...
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Broken bridges of governance
AT the recent Conference of Governors, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged governors to serve as “an effective bridge between the ...
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Railways on the wrong track
THERE seems to be something seriously wrong with Indian Railways. In a two-month period ending July 2024 there were three ...
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Floodplains belong to rivers
A river requires sufficient space to carry out its diverse functions. This space is delineated by the river itself, carving ...
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Not easy to find a Yunus
DEMOCRATIC institutions ensure that a State renews its legitimacy within civil society. When those who take control of the State subvert ...
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Skills survived many odds
AS we celebrate our 78th Independence Day, there’s no better time to honour the rich tapestry of handcrafted textiles that ...
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Boost that birthrate
A previous article (‘Demographic Dangers’, Civil Society, June 2024) discussed some implications of the latest fertility figures for India and ...
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On a weak foundation
WHEN Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents her sixth annual Financial Statement and Budget speech in Parliament, she will equal ...
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Small media with big impact
AMONG the many institutions of Indian democracy that earned disrepute in recent years the so-called ‘mainstream’ media stands out. Becoming ...
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The voter doesn’t have a choice
INDIAN political parties have honed the art of winning elections by holding the voter to ransom. Such is the decline ...
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The power of the collective
THE excitement and fervour surrounding the general election in India has been palpable, with heated discussions and loud campaigns dominating ...
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Demographic dangers
DEMOGRAPHY is in the news, thanks to the Lok Sabha elections and the latest projections of population growth. The former ...
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In Kafka’s universe
IN June every year the media publishes articles recollecting the imposition of Emergency by Indira Gandhi’s government in June 1975. ...
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2024: Two narratives
RESPONDING to the 2024 election manifesto of the Congress party, titled Nyay Patra, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said it bears ...
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Growing the rural start-up
STARTING an independent for-profit social enterprise in rural India is not just a venture — it’s a courageous step towards ...
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Cruising on troubled waters
THE world’s longest river cruise, Ganga Vilas, that was flagged off in 2023, covers five states in India and Bangladesh ...
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Innovation is the buzzword
INVENTION is the holy grail of researchers: to create something that does not exist and may not even have been ...
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Have money, will spend
THE Ambani family’s over-the-top partying at Jamnagar has been widely commented upon at home and abroad. Only the socially unaware ...
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Armed with a fearless pen
BE Fearless is a compelling, timeless but difficult call. When you are confronted by a hostile mob that is determined ...
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Exercising the right to die
AS medical science progresses and economic development leads to cleaner environments that transmit smaller infection loads, people are living longer ...
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Bringing back wildlife
SANCTUARIES inside rivers? Yes. There are several stretches of rivers that have been declared protected areas under the Wildlife Protection ...
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A chip for your thoughts
OVER the centuries, humans have constantly sought to increase their muscle power. Bullocks for ploughing, water currents for milling, and ...
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Money power and politics
A quarter-century ago, in a different era, a very different kind of politician from very different political parties sat together ...
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Pollution the internal enemy
First, let’s get this straight. There are no safe levels of air pollution. Experts speak in one voice when they ...
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A force for the river
THE Ganga Task Force (GTF) was stationed along the banks of the Ganga with the objective of preventing pollution from ...
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The status economy
WHERE do you live? This question, asked by a fellow guest at a Delhi party, can determine the flow of ...
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Business rules, everywhere
THE Covid pandemic which struck in February 2020 shattered the livelihoods of billions around the world and hundreds of thousands ...
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A river has the right to life
DESPITE our professed love for rivers and water bodies, our actions have inflicted deeper injuries on their wholesome existence. The ...
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Two compelling symbols
WE live in an age of many firsts. We are the first humans to have a ‘Doomsday Clock’ as well ...
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The leisure economy
ARE you free? This oft-asked question is prone to multiple interpretations. Human rights activists will understand it in the context ...
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Banga at the Bank
AJAY Banga made headlines when he was named president of the World Bank by US President Joe Biden. Indian born ...
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Space for peace
ISRO’s successful soft landing of Chandrayaan is a joyous moment that can inspire us to dwell on a big question. ...
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Delhi’s water footprint
MOST of the water consumed in Delhi is not of its own. Delhi’s water reflects a strange mix of power, ...
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India’s diamond
THE headline may lead you to think that this is about the diamond jubilee last year of India’s independence, or ...
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People and summits
A summit, by definition, is for summiteers. Sherpas are needed and so are all the camp staff. Ordinary people are ...
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Fight back with a kiss
IT is ten years since the annals of nonviolent civil disobedience were enlivened by the ‘kissing protest’ in Turkey. In ...
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Wrecked rivers hit back
OVER the past two months, there has been a series of natural disasters including flash floods, thunderstorms, cloudbursts, landslides, and ...
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Those left behind
DESPITE the ambiguity that the heading might lead to, this is not about the Communist or other Leftist parties as ...
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A debate of bytes
WE have all heard television journalists implore whoever they are seeking to interview, “Give me a byte”. In the age ...
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A laughing matter
Non-violent civil disobedience is usually associated with images of a lone, unarmed and grim-faced person standing defiantly in the path ...
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Highways vs rivers
When highways get built, they traverse many water bodies which feed rivers and streams and may in fact be more ...
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Diversity is strength
On occasion, most recently in the US, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken with pride about the diversity of India. ...
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Down the drain
During the year I was at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore the then Lt Governor ...
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Raising the hand of peace
AN impassioned procession of protesters was marching towards Gandhi Maidan in Patna. The year was 1974 and that procession was ...
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Yamuna is a little bit cleaner
THE Yamuna river is showing some signs of improvement in its water quality. The levels of biological oxygen demand (BOD) ...
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Diplomacy, society and business
For over two years the United States political and administrative system found it difficult to appoint an ambassador to India. ...
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Not an exclusive heaven
ONE morning, at a school assembly, the principal urged students and teachers to make their school a ‘heaven on earth’. ...
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Riverfronts kill rivers
RECENTLY, over 2,000 citizens participated in a unique protest along the banks of the Mula-Mutha river in Pune by hugging ...
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The pain of one
THERE is a new affliction across much of the world, especially in the West. Unlike Covid or other viruses, it ...
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Mobilizing civil society
CIVIL society groups have always been engaged in mainstream politics in one way or another, albeit at its margins. Rarely ...
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Map and save water bodies
A few months ago, I travelled to Bahraich district in Uttar Pradesh to carry out a mapping and surveying project ...
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With AI, a zero-sum game?
TECHNOLOGICAL singularity, an idea first advanced by mathematician John van Neumann, is when technological growth becomes self-sustaining, irreversible, and practically ...
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Censorship and self-censorship
THE problems for democracies, observed an editorial in the inaugural issue of the national newsmagazine India Today (December 1975), “is ...
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Will India seize the moment?
The tagline of the rap song "Apna time aayega" (My time will come) from the recent Hindi film, The Gully ...
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How cities swallow rivers
While working on the older Corona satellite pictures of Lucknow, I was impressed by the number of rivers that the city ...
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Kanyashree is the answer
The Assam government’s recent drive against child marriage, which has led to several thousand arrests, has created a turmoil in a ...
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For a ban on polygamy
Inequality between man and woman is one of the key features of an unfair male- dominated world order. Although India ...
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Foreign funds, Indian minds
A few years ago I had written in these very pages of Civil Society a column titled “Funding the Indian ...
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Floods now on climate agenda
MORE and more towns and cities across the world are facing the threat of extreme flooding. Climate change is increasingly ...
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Food fashions and the future
A much-used slogan is roti, kapda, makaan. Of these, food is a survival necessity, and has long been on top ...
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End the plan holiday
WE have had ‘plan holidays’, that is, a break from five-year plans, many times before. In the late 1960s, the ...
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Bring back wild and scenic rivers
IN my city I often search for a spot by the side of the Gomti river which looks somewhat wild ...
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What stole my job?
LAY-OFFS, unemployment, moonlighting and gig work, shortage of talent; amidst issues and contradictions, what is happening to jobs? People around ...
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Quantifying reality
THE Global Hunger Index (GHI), published by two European non-government organizations, has been universally slammed in India both by government ...
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A change of heart is welcome
THE significance of recent initiatives for Hindu-Muslim dialogue, reported in the media, cannot be under-valued in our highly polarized times. ...
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Dense city, dense flooding
THE rain in September and October with unexpected, powerful cloudbursts, and the phasing out of the monsoon was unusual on ...
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Name or number?
WHO am I? is a deep philosophical question, one which can take a lifetime of pondering. Humans are prone to ...
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Among the people
ON the eve of Rahul Gandhi’s padayatra political commentator Neerja Chaudhuri made a pertinent observation in a televised discussion. Almost ...
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Decentralize or drown
THE recent flooding in Bengaluru, the IT capital of India and amongst the most important global hubs for the tech ...
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Uncertainty complex
A new ‘uncertainty complex’ is unsettling lives and has already reversed the gains of five years of human development at ...
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On a digital high
Economies around the world are going through a major transition. In some, this has been slow and incremental, evolving over ...
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India at 75
In quick succession, between 1896 and 1906, Swami Vivekananda, Jamsetji Tata, Rabindranath Tagore and the engineer, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, who founded the ...
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War and the economy
WAR has direct human and economic consequences. Often, such consequences impact not just the countries at war but many others, ...
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Mobility matters
CRUCIAL meeting to get to, and stuck in a traffic jam? That is when you realize how much mobility matters. ...
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River as a person with rights
THE idea of endowing legal rights on non-humans and entities with constitutional protections is not new. Local grassroots movements ...
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Rivers need groundwater
THE Ganga basin, the world’s most densely irrigated area, is a global hotspot of groundwater depletion. The five states through ...
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Creating urban harmony
THEFTS. Street crime. Dacoities. Drugs. Gang wars. No, this is not the ad blurb for a new Bollywood potboiler; rather, ...
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Gyanvapi and Nupur Sharma
POLITICIANS thrive on staying in the news. No publicity is bad publicity for them, as the old saying goes. For ...
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The federal political cycle
ECONOMISTS are familiar with the concept of a business cycle and some even with the idea of a political business ...
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Hindi and cow belt politics
AMERICAN journalist Robert Lane Greene’s much appreciated book, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics ...
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Demography-driven migration
DEMOGRAPHY has, for some years now, been recognized as a driver of various key parameters of a nation. A country ...
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The other divide
AMITAVA Ghosh’s recently published book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, exploring the historical roots of global warming and ecological destruction, tracing them ...
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Counting daisies?
IT takes a child to tell an emperor that he is not wearing any clothes. My seven-year-old grandson made me ...
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The future wars
THE war in Ukraine has busted many a myth. Most have felt, for some years now, that the days of ...
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Atmanirbharata redux
WHEN Prime Minister Narendra Modi first spoke about the concept of atmanirbharata, many mainstream economists criticized him for reverting to ...
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Putting the powerless first
THE COVID-19 pandemic has put the global economy through a severe stress test. As accelerated stress tests do in medicine ...
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Reason to wonder and worry
IN the years ahead, technology will affect and change our lives even more than it has in the past. Last ...
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IOU: A 2022 message for 2024
INDIA is a psephologist’s and electoral data miner’s delight. Not only does the country generate an enormous amount of electoral ...
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2030 can be India’s techade
ELECTIONS in many states this year and for the Lok Sabha in 2024; the 75th anniversary of Independence and of ...
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The decline of debate
ON August 5, 2019, I met Arun Jaitley, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, for the last time at his ...
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Children of a lesser God
Mahdi Basheer Hasan al Badri is barely 30 years old and the product of three wars as well as a ...
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The outward bound
When news of business billionaire MukeshAmbani acquiring a massive 300-acre estate in England was flashed in the media, it was ...
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What did Afghan NGOs achieve?
I worked in Afghanistan from 2004 till 2016 on short assignments with the UN system and national and international CSOs ...
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Bombay House and Delhi
WHEN the Narendra Modi government announced its decision to hand over Air India back to the House of Tatas, a ...
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Bad bill, good policy in UP
THE population issue has been a predominant political and electoral subject of speculation for decades. With one of the oldest ...
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Koizumi’s question
ON his first visit to India in 2005, Japan’s Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, asked his host, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ...
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Towards holistic care
In the world of music today it would be considered weird, perhaps sacrilegious, for any group of professional musicians or ...
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