India in Space
India’s Mission to Mars got approved today by the Prime Minister, the Rs. 450 crore ($80 million) plan receiving a final nod. The Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO is to start preparing for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reaping what we sowed
On July 30, the lights went out all over North India, but that statement hides as much as it reveals. For many people in India, power supply (let alone uninterrupted power supply) is a distant dream....
View ArticleUrban water supply without groundwater?
Earlier in January, Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson, Arghyam) was invited by the Finance Minister to a pre-budget consultation along with other social sector representatives. From Arghyam, we made a...
View ArticleIn Pragati: From Open Data to a Culture of Openness
This week, I write in Pragati, the Indian National Interest Review about thinking beyond open data and creating a culture of openness in India: Building sound public policies requires robust...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Visualising Karnataka’s municipal elections 2013
Urban Karnataka took to the polling booth earlier this month to vote for their corporators and municipal councillors. The elections were to be a four-way contest, with the Indian National Congress...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sanitation in Rural India and Karnataka – How has the needle moved?
Sanitation is among the most dismal and depressing topics in India, across the country. While sanitation in our cities comes with its own set of problems, rural sanitation in India is stuck a primitive...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Toilets in Rural Karnataka – A peer effect?
In my previous post, I had taken a look at how sanitation improved in rural Karnataka and India over the decade of 2001 to 2011. Three broad categories of districts had emerged in Karnataka, and a...
View ArticleWahabism, Wahhabism and Salafism
My fellow blogger Karthik Shashidhar along with Narayan Ramachandran took a quick look at the use of wahhabi and salafi as terms that describe a particularly conservative branch of Sunni Islam. Their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bangalore refuses to turn up and vote
In the face of high expectations, the residents of Bangalore yet again failed to turn up and vote in large numbers in yesterday’s assembly elections. With 52.8% of the Bangalore Urban district’s voters...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In Search of a New Village
The south Indian state of Karnataka has over 29,000 villages spread across a 190,000 square kilometres. Anyone who travels a little in the state quickly realises that there are common village names...
View ArticleIntroduce Crisis Pricing for Water
Bangalore appears to be heading an unprecedented water crisis with plummeting water levels in the KRS reservoir and weak river flows in the Hemavathi. Afshan Yasmeen from The Hindu tells us that the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How much is Water Supply subsidised in Bangalore?
Continuing from yesterday’s post about introducing crisis pricing of water in Bangalore, here’s the real picture of how water gets subsidised for all residents of the city who receive municipal supply....
View ArticleFukushima – feat, not folly.
The latest news on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown that took place in March 2011 came in a few days ago: Now the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has drawn...
View ArticleEconomic conservatism vs. social conservatism
Mint has a great editorial today on the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological conflicts: The BJP needs to get over this dichotomy. The bulk of Indians today are concerned with livelihood issues....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Not every disaster is man-made
Uttarakhand has been a scene of unfolding horror for the past four days, and is a human tragedy occuring at a scale that is staggering. For many people in India, it is also a disaster that hits home –...
View ArticleWe are still vulnerable to climate variability
Samanth Subramaniam writes in UAE’s The National on the floods in Uttarakhand and quotes me on the link between flooding and climate change. But Pavan Srinath, a policy researcher at the Chennai-based...
View ArticleNo food security without sanitation
Debate has been raging on the Food Security Bill in India for quite a while now, at least in the English press and online commentary. Until recently, the role of sanitation in malnutrition (and by...
View ArticleNDTV’s We The People – On the Uttarakhand floods
Last Sunday, I appeared on NDTV’s We The People hosted by Barkha Dutt, to talk about the recent floods in Uttarakhand and on the “eco-insensitive” nature of politics in India. Here’s a clip of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hybrid buses: An exercise in vanity environmentalism
Missed opportunities outweigh any gains hybrid buses make in terms of fuel efficiency. In a move that has been in the making for several months, the Ministry of Urban Development has decided to fund...
View ArticleLines in the sand
The latest poverty figures for India show that it has declined to just 22 percent as of 2011-12, based on data from the National Sample Survey. At a time when information such as this is coming out,...
View Article
