Leapfrogging empowerment and development

Indian Express has an Independence day special series – India explained, India empowered. The series was flagged off by an article by the President Dr.APJ Abdul Kalam. The focus of the President’s note is “Empowering Rural India”- and is titled – India Empowered to me is Knowledge taking roots in the village. Read the full… Continue reading Leapfrogging empowerment and development

Is UP ready for AIDS?

In an earlier post Reining in the spread of AIDS, I had written about the surprising and rather unbelievable finding thrown up by the annual AIDS survey. Only 28,000 new infections were reported in 2004, compared to 6 lakh in 2003. My hypothesis then was that reported cases of AIDS were on the decline –… Continue reading Is UP ready for AIDS?

Father / husband’s name

I bought a new mobile phone from the Reliance outlet (upgradation – so I can take pics from my mobile phone and so on – ahem). And had to fill out a longish form before they handed over the new handset to me. Among the interesting personal details they (reliance ? government?) wanted to know… Continue reading Father / husband’s name

The long ride to freedom

Yesterday’s HT had a small piece on how the Tamilnadu chief minister Jayalalitha was distributing free bicycles to school children in rural areas of the state. This was to encourage them to continue school and not drop out – earlier it was found that girls from backward communities who had been given free bicycles under… Continue reading The long ride to freedom

The education “system”

Update: Came across this very interesting piece on Robert Paterson’s blog. It ends with In short: As connectedness transforms knowledge, our education system is swinging–running–in the other direction. Do read it fully – Robert has linked to the original piece by David Weinberger there on his post. Found two pieces of writing on the education… Continue reading The education “system”