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Kasanagottu Nageshwar
Bofors saga: a new twist and a story retold – Mayank Chhaya
- April 27, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
A callow prime minister, a global superstar, shadowy international arms dealers, crafty middlemen and nosy journalists were the dramatis personae of a real life political thriller that played out in New Delhi, Stockholm, London and New York over a quarter century ago. Of all the names crowding India’s biggest and most notorious arms purchase scandal at that time, the most [...]
Empowering rural women to fight for their rights – Richa Sharma
- April 27, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
Seema Saroj, a resident of Pratapgarh district in Uttar Pradesh, was denied payment under the rural jobs scheme for months. She then joined Nari Sangh, a women’s group working for the rights of people, and took on the authorities to get her pending dues. Saroj is one among over 80,000 women from 666 gram panchayats in nine districts of eastern [...]
Al Qaeda Footprints Increasing in Syria – Seema Mustafa, Newsclick,
- April 27, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
Seema Mustafa, who has just returned from Syria, reports on the increased presence of al Qaeda is Syria and its alliance on the ground with the armed opposition groups. The al Qaeda, in the form of hard core Islamist groups has started filtering into Syria with suicide bomb attacks becoming a more frequent feature of the ongoing crisis. The Syrian [...]
Huge Indian investments create jobs in US: Survey – Arun Kumar
- April 26, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
Indian companies operating in 40 American states have invested over $820 million in manufacturing facilities in the US, creating thousands of jobs, according to the 2012 India Business Forum (IBF) survey. The survey “Indian Roots, American Soil: Adding Value to US Economy and Society”, released by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at a reception on Capitol Hill Wednesday, highlights [...]
With reforms under stress, India stares at ratings cut
- April 26, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
In a firm warning that all is not well with the Indian economy, the country’s outlook was lowered Wednesday to negative from stable by Standard and Poors’ with the caveat that its credit rating may also be downgraded. But the government said there was no need to panic. As of now, the global ratings agency has kept India’s long-term rating [...]
Risat-1 catapults India into a select group of nations – Venkatachari Jagannathan
- April 26, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
On an early Thursday morning, an Indian rocket successfully launched into orbit a microwave Radar Imaging Satellite (Risat-1) from the spaceport here in Andhra Pradesh, some 80 km from Chennai. With the launch of Risat-1, India has now joined a select group of nations having such a technology. The indigenously built Risat-1, with a life span of five years, will [...]
Talk therapy for India’s depressed – Madhulika Sonkar
- April 25, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles
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It is early morning, and inside a single-storey building’s basement, a man picks up one of four ringing telephones. He asks the caller in a deep baritone: “But what went wrong?” and steers the person towards an hour-long conversation. It was a depressed caller, he says later. The man, who uses the pseudonym Zaki Shah, is from the hush-hush world [...]
Neither Congress nor BJP has the people’s mandate – Amulya Ganguli
- April 25, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
Elections in India for even the panchayats and civic bodies are seen as political barometers. Although they are supposed to reflect local concerns, no party can afford to ignore their outcome, not least because they are all fought on political lines. The high turnout for these contests, as for the recent Delhi Municipal Corporation polls, is also an indication that [...]
World Immunization Week rolls out in more than 180 countries : “Protect your world: Get vaccinated”
- April 25, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
For the first time, public health communities in all regions of the world are focussing at the same time on the importance of vaccination against deadly diseases. WHO’s World Immunization Week is being held from 21 to 28 April 2012 with activities in more than 180 countries. The theme of the week, ‘Protect your world: Get vaccinated’, aims to reinforce [...]
World Malaria Day 2012 : Scaling up the fight against malaria
- April 25, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
- no comments
On the eve of World Malaria Day 2012, WHO hails global progress in combating malaria but highlights the need to further reinforce the fight. WHO’s new initiative, T3: Test, Treat, Track, urges malaria-endemic countries and donors to move towards universal access to diagnostic testing and antimalarial treatment, and to build robust malaria surveillance systems. A million lives saved “In the past [...]
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Kasanagottu Nageshwar
Professor Janice Neil, Associate Professor, School of Journalism, Faculty of Communication and Design of Ryerson University, Toronto, brings the insights of a two-decade-long career in news reporting and production into her academic work. She joined the Ryerson faculty in 2007, where she presently teaches television news and radio journalism to students in the Bachelor of Journalism and Masters of Journalism [...]
The exodus of workforce to the Gulf countries has been so much a part of Kerala and its history that the subject of migration is more a household topic than a social issue. But spawning a generation weaned away from their mothers, reared by secondary caregivers, subjected to all kinds of abuse and neglect should set the alarm bells ringing. [...]
Packaged food industry to touch $30 bln by 2015
- April 29, 2012
(82% workforce prefer packaged food) Growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 15 to 20% annually, Indian packaged food industry is likely to touch $30 billion by 2015 from the current level of $15 billion including snacks food, ready-to-eat food, healthy and functional food, said ASSOCHAM today. Factors that have fuelled this industry’s growth are the arrival [...]
A Delhi court Saturday awarded four years’ rigorous imprisonment to former Bharitya Janata Party (BJP) president Bangaru Laxman in a fake arms deal case of the charge of accepting money, to facilitate government contracts, from Tehelka journalists, who, posing as arms dealers, filmed him in a sting operation in 2001. The court also slapped him with a fine of Rs.1 lakh. [...]
Recently the union cabinet has cleared the marital reforms bill without mentioning anything about the recommendation of Parliamentary Standing Committee headed by MP Jayanti Natarajan, to give a share to wife in the marital property. While examining the proposed Bill on changes in divorce provisions, the PSC received several representations for providing financial security to house wives to secure protection [...]
- April 27, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Features/ Articles, Focus
A callow prime minister, a global superstar, shadowy international arms dealers, crafty middlemen and nosy journalists were the dramatis personae of a real life political thriller that played out in New Delhi, Stockholm, London and New York over a quarter century ago. Of all the names crowding India’s biggest and most notorious arms purchase scandal at that time, the most [...]
India: Teenage Girls Frame Society – Anjali Singh
- April 29, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Women's Issues
- no comments
There are some young, budding filmmakers in Uttar Pradesh who are capturing poignant personal stories and social realities on film. No, they are not students of some fancy film school; they are teenaged girls, who, until a few months back, had never held a camera in their hands; whose world revolved around their modest home and school; and who, as [...]
India: Village Women Wield Tools For Equality – Kulsoom Rashid
- April 29, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Women's Issues
- no comments
The district of Dindori is perched almost on the border that Madhya Pradesh shares with Chhattisgarh and is remote by any standards. It is largely tribal and also extremely poor. So when a group of women located in Dindori names their federation after the famous local woman icon, Rani Durgavati, who is said to have courageously defended herkingdomofGadha– one of [...]
Sri Lanka: Top Jobs Still Elude Media Women – Vijita Fernando
- April 29, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Women's Issues
- no comments
In post-colonialSri Lankawomen have reached the top in the popular professions of medicine, engineering, banking and in the private sector. While this encouraging trend has spread to family-owned business houses and even small-scale enterprises in the rural areas, the one profession where women have yet to enjoy that kind of equality and success is the media. The numbers of women [...]
Professor Janice Neil, Associate Professor, School of Journalism, Faculty of Communication and Design of Ryerson University, Toronto, brings the insights of a two-decade-long career in news reporting and production into her academic work. She joined the Ryerson faculty in 2007, where she presently teaches television news and radio journalism to students in the Bachelor of Journalism and Masters of Journalism [...]
India: Moments, Contradictions… Sheba Chhachhi’s Snapshots From A Movement
- April 29, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Art /Culture /Books
- no comments
Sheba Chhachhi works with lens-based images, both still and moving, investigating questions of gender, ecology, violence and visual culture. Her works address the question of transformation, personal and collective memory, retrieving the marginal and the play between the mythic and the social. A long-time chronicler of the women’s movement in India, as both photographer and activist, she began developing collaborative, [...]
India: High-Tech Loans To The Rescue Of Rural Women – Surekha Kadapa-Bose
- April 29, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Economy /Business
- no comments
Last September, Priya Singh, a civil servant with the Indian Revenue Service, was chatting with her Singapore-based friend on the social networking site, Facebook. With Singh’s upcoming birthday, the conversation invariably turned to how she was planning to celebrate. Singh was looking to do something different that year and so her friend told her about Milaap, an online platform that [...]
India: Bengal’s Tribal Women Lead Change – Ajitha Menon
- April 29, 2012
- By India Current Affairs
- Women's Issues
- no comments
It was ironical that Purulia district often found itself on the West Bengal government’s ‘drought-hit’ list when the average rainfall here is 1100mm-1500mm. The failure to conserve water as well as poor agricultural practices meant that despite back-breaking labour in the fields, farmers could only achieve six months’ food sufficiency. Today, however, all that is changing thanks to a water [...]
The exodus of workforce to the Gulf countries has been so much a part of Kerala and its history that the subject of migration is more a household topic than a social issue. But spawning a generation weaned away from their mothers, reared by secondary caregivers, subjected to all kinds of abuse and neglect should set the alarm bells ringing. [...]