Exactly a century after his great-grandfather Motilal Nehru took over the reins of the Congress party, it’s ironic that Rahul Gandhi, the fifth generation leader of the Gandhi-Nehru family, has stepped down as the president of the Grand Old Party.
Being Rahul isn’t enviable and being in his boots in 2019 is something most, even inside the Congre...
India unfortunately doesn’t have a privacy protection law as many democracies do. Digital technologies are double-edged swords. It is more likely that the design and use of data and digital technologies can potentially be intrusive and erode human rights.
Traditional police watch-towers and other surveillance methods had only a limited reach and...
“Whatever budget they table, it will only benefit the corporates. Small shopkeepers like us won't get anything out of it,” says Selvakumar, a provision store owner in Chennai. Similar sentiments hang in the air as the economic growth sank to a five-year low of 6.8 per cent the previous year.
As Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman gets ready to p...
In 2014, 38-year-old Devaraj KJ from Mandya, a town about 100 km from Bengaluru, joined Ola. When he quit his job at a small travel company to join the giant ride aggregator, he thought a bright future lay ahead.
Buoyed by the earnings of his peers, who had earlier moved to the fleet, Devaraj decided to take a chance on the tech start-up. It was...
It’s a Saturday, when many children are out playing on their day off. Six-year-old Kajal (name changed), from Odisha’s Koraput district, is revising her language lessons in Odia with her teacher Gulnaar at a small work site centre in Perumbakkam, Chennai. She isn’t the only one in the small room. Uday (name changed) from Nellore in Andhra Pradesh i...
“Time is precious. I look at time (combined with my passion for what I do) as an investment, and it’s the only kind of investment I plan to make,” says 27-year-old Ramesh Thuthan, an artist at Cuckoo Forest School in Singarapettai, Tamil Nadu. For the past six years he has lived in a small, one-room mud hut on the grounds of the school, painting, c...
Bengaluru, one of the first cities in India to have an urban development plan, has grown into an unwieldy, badly planned mess. Once the ‘garden city’ and ‘pensioner’s paradise’, it has acquired labels like ‘garbage city’ and is the butt of all jokes on traffic jams. What happened to Bengaluru’s urban development plans?
The city notified a green ...
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)’s GSLV Mk-III rocket will carry Chandrayaan-2, weighing 3.8 tonnes, towards the moon, in the wee hours of July 15, and mark the beginning of a new era in the history of Indian space exploration. When the lander, named Vikram (short for Vikram Sarabhai, the father of the Indian space programme), and Prag...
A resident of Medavakkam in Chennai, Jaya’s daily routine begins at 5 am — she quickly gets ready to travel almost 16 km to reach her workplace in Thyagaraya Nagar. Until two months ago, her biggest concern was getting on the bus at the right time to reach her workplace on time. Now, she has a more pressing issue to worry about — making sure she ha...
Tamil Nadu, along with the other southern states, is known for its focus on the education sector. Aside from stereotypes of churning out software engineers, it is one of the best performing states in elementary education and its schools are known for being accessible to children, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. However...
He smiled, she nodded. It was Abha Das's first day at B.Barooah college in Assam's Guwahati. The pair of hazel eyes that smiled at Abha belonged to Nayan Sarmah, her senior in political science department. The year was 1998. As a group of 'seniors' waited for the 'freshers' to get 'introduced' to, a so-called ritual about which Abha was warned of b...
When tech giant Facebook was getting popular over a decade ago, the online virtual farming game FarmVille kept internet users across the world hooked to the social networking platform. The game allowed users own a piece of virtual land and cultivate crops. Millions of Facebook users logged on to the platform to sow seeds and water their crops daily...
Exactly two years ago, Muzaffarpur made national headlines after finding a place in the exalted Smart City list. The much-touted Smart City Mission was launched by Prime Minister Modi in 2015 with the promise of changing urban lives and living experience in 100 Indian cities within five years. Of course, the original deadline was later extended to ...
In February 2017, then finance minister Arun Jaitley said in the budget that the government planned to float an initial public offering of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), among other state-run companies, in the financial year 2017-18. Two years hence, the online rail-ticket booking company may finally hit the market in comi...
Nearly four decades ago, Arjun Singh went for his first job interview. A village bumpkin, Singh had cleared his intermediate (Class 12) exams and was looking for a job in the city of dreams Mumbai. When the interviewer asked him about his qualifications, Singh proudly said he was a village topper. The manager then asked if he spoke any English sinc...
Bengaluru: Until two years ago, Mahaboob Shaik (name changed) owned a garment factory that employed 53 people. But the government’s shock banknote ban in November 2016 and the July 2017 implementation of the Goods and Services Tax wrecked his business. In late 2017, Shaik shut his factory in Bengaluru’s Peenya industrial area and laid off all the workers. The...
In 2008, the then Tamil Nadu CM M Karunanidhi recalled an incident that had happened when he used to live in Chennai's Thyagaraya Nagar (T Nagar) decades ago. His son Stalin, then a young child, had swallowed a safety pin one day. The agonised parents — Karunanidhi and wife Dayalu Ammal — could not rush him to the doctor in nearby Kodambakkam as th...
In a country of 1.3 billion people, it is estimated that when India's national cricket side plays a big game, such as India versus Pakistan, around 400 million people watch the game on television. And that was according to a survey in 2014. That figure is higher than the current population of the United States at 329 million. If we add the populati...
Coimbatore: Located on the foothills of the Western Ghats, Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu is a pensioner's paradise. It is the first city in the country to have a ‘retirement community’ set up way back in the late 1990s. Today it has numerous senior citizen homes run by private players.
There is a difference between ‘old age homes’ and ‘senior citizen homes’. Whi...
45-year-old Ganesh Kumar, founder of a restaurant called Just Orient in Chennai, was mercilessly bullied by friends for his poor Hindi. But that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. He says, “That is why today I am able to hire staff from Bihar and Jharkhand at my restaurant and I am able to work with them well, speaking a language they underst...
The idea to link peninsular rivers dates back to the late 19th century, when the acclaimed British-era engineer Arthur Cotton drew up plans to connect them
On a busy Monday morning on April 1, S Thangavelu, a youth in his 20s, tried to download a movie at Katpadi railway station in Tamil Nadu. Waiting for his next train to Bengaluru, Thangavelu connected to the ‘free’ Wi-Fi network and tried downloading the movie on his 4G (fourth-generation)-enabled smartphone. In the first half hour, he couldn’t eve...
Chennai: A baby's HIV status can change until it is 18 months old, as new research has found. Seven-month-old Kalai, who tested +ve, could see a different result.
The Federal visited the IMH and found that the institute has many patients with criminal records, including murder charges, and no one wants to take them.
Kanchana says she has completed all her duties, and that she has gotten both her sons married. But the weight of debt hangs heavy over her head. “In our narikurava community, dowry is not given by girls. It is the boy's family that should give money. That's how I ended up with a debt of ₹4 lakh,” she says.
At 45, she runs a household of five mem...
Most engineers his age have settled down at mid-level positions in companies. Tabrez Ahmed of Chennai quit his job eight years ago and initiated a startup. His company is a one-man show and its aim is not to make money. It seeks to disprove the second law of thermodynamics.
It’s a project that engineering students sometimes imagine in the second...
For Dr Pramila (name changed), a psychiatrist with nearly 15 years of experience, a counselling session with her friend once a month is a must. But it is a session with a difference — Pramila is the client here, and she just seeks company to vent her emotions or talk about professional problems.
Mental health professionals deal with emotional ex...
Despite the rout of the BJP in Tamil Nadu, the last holdout for the party in the country, BJP leaders feel there is a space for the party in the state. Quoting nationalism and Indian pride, the BJP decimated CPM in Tripura and put Mamata’s TMC on the backfoot in West Bengal. The party might repeat and implement similar political strategies for Tam...
The Adanjiamman temple had been closed for several years. In 2013, a group of Leftist and dalit activists forced it open to ensure that dalits be granted entry. Things were smooth for nearly a year before the temple at Nathanallur near Wallajahbad, in Kancheepuram district of Tamil Nadu, shut again.
In the villages of Tamil Nadu, it is common to...
Chennai: As reports of the Left’s near-total decimation in the elections came, a Leftist intellectual muttered, “You have to give it to Tamil Nadu. Must be Periyar and his innate rebelliousness…” and trailed off.
Also read: Why Tamil Nadu remains a tough nut to crack for the BJP
Leftists from Kerala used to poke fun at Dravidianism. They called it a f...
Chennai: The results of various exit polls that were released on May 19 left the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) elated, the Opposition squirming and the general public confused.
Chennai: Unlike opinion polls, which are conducted after the last ballot has been cast and before the counting of votes, exit polls are done on election day outside the polling station.
Lok Sabha 2019 has witnessed an aggressive Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) trying to stay in power for a second term. Even as the Congress has attempted to fight it, the saffron party’s most bitter opponent this time around has been a woman from the east. West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) Chief Mamata Banerjee has matched the BJP...
Pulwama: While Jammu and Kashmir as a whole recorded 45 per cent voter turnout (lowest in the country) in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, three Lok Sabha constituencies — Baramulla, Srinagar and Anantnag — recorded 34.29 per cent, 14.08 per cent and 8.78 per cent respectively.
Recent news that former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan is one of the top contenders for the Bank of England (BoE) chief caught the attention of top economists, RBI officials and general citizens alike. Pundits in the world of business, finance and economics are closely following the developments to see if Rajan, ranked second i...
Chennai: As internet penetration in India swells — to 627 million users, or nearly 50 per cent of the population by the end of 2019, according to market research agency Kantar IMRB — an increasing number of people are relying on online sources for news. This translates to a better relationship between the internet and politics, which is constantly finding w...
During elections, big parties try to ally with smaller parties who can push them past the first past the post system. Muslim parties are favourite pickings for those scounting for alliances since it is believed Muslims vote en bloc for parties claiming to represent their community. Booth level data of three Assembly constituencies (Ambur, Nagapatti...
We’ve all interacted with people who suffer from mental illnesses, whether it’s that friend who’s struggling with depression or that ‘crazy’ person who wanders the streets everyone avoids. Yet, as a society, we hem and haw when it comes to addressing the issue of mental healthcare. The stigma around mental illness remains severe, thereby creating a...
At Varanasi’s Dashashwamedh Ghat, a middle-aged man covered in sandalwood paste is gazing at the Ganga, unmindful of the goings on around him. The world-famous 'aarti', the ritual of offering prayer to the river, has just ended. The people, largely tourists, have begun to empty out, but the man stands still. He isn’t wonderstruck by the beauty of t...
Chennai: In Karaikudi, where BJP's national secretary H Raja is contesting as the AIADMK alliance candidate, an auto stand sports a saffron flag with the BJP lotus on it. In Tamil Nadu, where auto unions are typically affiliated to the CPM’s CITU, DMK’s LPF or even the AIADMK, a RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Janata Mazdoor Mahasangh (BJMM) auto stand is certainl...
Pulwama: There’s a chill in the air as midnight descends on Kangan village in Pulwama district of South Kashmir on April 29. Two youngsters — 21-year-old Danish Ashraf Dar and his 14-year-old cousin, Shahnawaz Ashraf Dar — are fast asleep in their home. Fourteen others, including two children, are also curled up in the house.
Anantnag: the economic h...
A few years ago, a day like Monday, April 29, would have been a busy day in Namakkal, Tamil Nadu. The state board Class 10 exam results had been released and that would have meant frantic phone calls and personal inquiries at the schools here. But this year, Namakkal streets showed little traces of any buzz and the schools wore a deserted look.
...
The Parsa coal block, one of 30 in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand region, is a step closer from getting environmental clearance. This will be the third mine to open, after Chotia and Parsa East and Kete Basan (PEKB), in what was once a ‘No Go’ area for coal mining in the state. Opening another mine in the core forest area could have deleterious conseq...
The Hyderabadis started with big dreams in the 1990s. They had a mascot in Chandrababu Naidu who claimed a tech-savvy image for himself when most politicians thought the mouse was an animal. They had a generation of friends and relatives working in the IT industry in the US, which meant all the spinoff could possibly come to them. But the hard real...
During elections, river pollution is not a serious issue for Indian politicians, especially when there are bigger problems to milk such as joblessness and farmer distress. But for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who began his 2014 campaign with “Mujhe toh Ma Ganga ne bulaya hai (Mother Ganga has called me),” the very same river may prove to be his un...
While the international dimensions of the Sri Lankan blasts – ISIS link, Christchurch revenge – are being probed, a purely local angle may hold the key to understanding the terror surge on the day of Easter in the island.
As Sri Lankan security forces launch an operation to flush out terror groups and neutralize them, several videos have emerged...
Chennai: The fine print in the opening credits of the movie, 'Gangs of Wasseypur 1' contains a reference to 'Subramaniapuram' — a landmark Tamil film that showed the rootedness of gangsters in southern Tamil Nadu and the sense of kinship that spurred their violence. 'Subramaniapuram' was a period film. Released in 2008, it captured the era of Madurai, and b...
Chennai: Data can often look strange. For instance, the Central Marine Fisheries Institute (CMFRI) estimates that the export component of the fish catch from Tamil Nadu’s 13 coastal districts fetched a total of nearly ₹30,000 crore as foreign exchange to the country in 2017. This means each fisherman generates ₹25,000 worth of export catch a month, and this...
Chennai: Only a few from India such as CV Raman and Venkatesh Ramakrishnan have been awarded the Nobel Prize for physical sciences. For long, India did not have a highly developed science system to truly merit a greater claim to the prizes. But with economic progress the science system has improved in the country.
India is now at a point when cutting edg...
Pune: Sunil Pawale and his family were all over the media in March. Newspaper headlines screamed at how he was made to eat faeces by his employer because he had argued with him. Pawale and his family did not have a healthy employee-employer relationship with their tormentor. They were modern-day slaves earning ₹100 a day at a brick kiln near Pune. More t...
Chennai: In Tamil Nadu, Vijayakanth is an actor-turned politician whose electoral performance has dipped considerably in recent years. He has been practically written off as a contender for power. Seeman, who heads the Tamil Nationalist Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK), attracts impressionable youth with oratory but his pro-LTTE stance and extreme positions make h...
New Delhi: India’s earliest sanitation systems date back to 2600 BC, during the Indus Valley Civilisation as excavations have shown. Yet the country and its citizens knowingly or unknowingly propagate the ideologies of British India when it comes to eradicating open defecation. That is, until recently.
Sacrosanct in ancient India
From the time of the I...
Hyderabad: When the NDA government unveiled in its last budget the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi — an investment support scheme for farmers — the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) lost no time in taking credit for pioneering the idea in the country. A flurry of statements followed highlighting how the central government ‘copied’ the Rythu Bandhu sche...
Ambedkar, whose 128th birth centenary was observed on Sunday, April 14, has become the elephant in a game of blind men and the elephant. Hindutvavadis see in his virulent criticism of Islam and the role of Muslims in Indian history a vindication of their own political agenda. Dalit intellectuals and politicians see in his political activity and int...
Chennai: It is 9 am, the busiest time of the day, and Munuswamy is busy sharpening his knife at the Pernambut slaughterhouse. It is one of the four licenced slaughterhouses in Vellore where cattle (excluding cows) are killed for meat. Forty-five-year old Munuswamy is one among the many dalits in the district who eke out a livelihood by skinning cattle at th...
On the Tamil Nadu vs Kerala Lottery Guessing Group on Facebook, 28-year-old Vijay from Coimbatore goes by the name ‘Vijay Loki KL.’ He doles out the last three digits of the 6-digit Kerala lottery numbers on WhatsApp, guaranteeing a bumper prize. “I am an agent and I will help you win,” he says on the group, displaying his number and the picture of...
Back in 1996, when a rumour of a miracle led millions of Hindus in India to believe that idols of Ganesha were drinking milk, a temple on a hilltop in a small town of Arunachal Pradesh too witnessed an overnight rush of devotees.
Many in the picturesque town of Ziro in Lower Subansiri district rushed to witness the miracle and started claiming t...
Bengaluru: It’s 2.30 in the afternoon on April 4. A political rally by Karnataka Chief Minister’s son Nikhil Kumaraswamy is about to take place in Mandya’s Thimmakoppalu, a village about 120 km from the state capital.
Sitting outside the house with his grandmother and a dog in tow, 22-year-old Abhishek TD, a farmer’s son, browses videos on his smartphone. ...
At 11 pm, on a routine day in the early 2000s, the land phone at the residence of the chief medical officer of Capital Hospital rang. It was a call from the chief minister. On a lonely stretch of the Khurda-Bhubaneswar highway, the CM’s convoy had come across two men dragging a young woman along.
Seeing the fleet of cars, the men had fled, leavi...
When Indian Air Force fighter pilot Abhinandan Vardhaman was held hostage by Pakistan a month back, support for his release and pride over his nativity swelled in equal measure in his home State of Tamil Nadu. Abhinandan didn't quite sound like a Tamil name. Was he from Kerala? they wondered.
Abhinandan Vardhaman comes from the community of Tami...
In the run up to the Lok Sabha elections 2019, the Indian National Congress has announced a flagship scheme to uplift the economically weaker sections (EWS). Under the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), the Congress has promised to give ₹72,000 annually to the poorest 20% of Indian families.
The announcement has triggered a discussion on whether such sc...
The Dravidian movement owes much to history, or to a particular reading of history, as some critics would say it. It has constructed an identity politics based on the premise that Tamils are historically an ethnic group quite apart from Hindu India.
Since then, it has become a practice for groups and parties to invoke history — real, hazy, writt...
As electioneering picks up and campaigning goes on in full swing, protecting the leaders becomes a key issue for the nation’s security establishment. The four most protected people are Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. Of them three are candidates in the Lok Sabha election.
Modi’s security ha...
It was a conclave attended by more than a lakh women drawn from among the poorest sections of Kendrapara and Cuttack districts of Odisha. The speaker read out from an Odia text written in English. His accent, though foreign, was familiar to the crowd and did not hamper his ability to connect with them. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik told the women b...
For the first time in nearly three decades, there was no change of government after the 2016 elections in Tamil Nadu. There were clear signs of anti-incumbency across Tamil Nadu under the AIADMK regime but the DMK seemed just unable to take advantage. The DMK-Congress alliance lost the election narrowly and the vote difference was just two percenta...
Coimbatore/Tirupur: Two huge life size banners of Jayalalithaa overlook the AIADMK headquarters at Royapettah in Chennai. A woman in her 50s staring at the banners with folded hands mumbled: “Amma, en dheivame … ivanga aatatha ellam paakringala?” (Amma, My God… Are you watching them play the game?)
“Who are playing the game?” I asked.
“Who else, the two who are ...
Chennai/Hyderabad/Bengaluru: The iconic Gandhi glasses were etched on the door of what looked like a wardrobe — a two feet by two feet enclosure. It had no running water although it was a toilet — among the 54 constructed recently as part of the Swachh Bharat Mission at the narikkurava (gypsy tribe) settlement, near Poonamallee, of Thiruvallur district near Chennai. “It is too...
The door was ajar. When this reporter was about to knock, a family member ushered him in. A man was sitting shirtless on the sofa with his sacred thread visible across his chest, poring over some papers through a watchmaker’s lens. His ash-smeared forehead glistened as he stood up to wear a shirt before talking to this correspondent.
It was a re...
On a balmy afternoon in early February, as a bunch of middle-aged men engaged in a discussion about the coming elections and the foreigners’ issue in Assam at a roadside tea stall in Guwahati, the conversation suddenly veered to the “badly made” cup of saah (Assamese for tea). One said it was too sugary. Another complained it was totally xereka (to...
Parimala, a resident of North Chennai, has been running a wholesale medicine business for over a decade. Unable to come up with collateral that would satisfy bankers, she couldn’t raise money to expand her business. Two years ago, however, she got what she wanted: ₹25 lakh as soft loan under the Mudra scheme.
Sivaramasubramanian, a milk vendor o...
