Literacy   “Education is regarded as the most crucial investment in human development. It significantly contributes to make improvement in health, hygiene, demographic profile, productivity and practically all that has a bearing on the quality of life”. Our awareness notwithstanding, our ranking in the annual HRD (Human Resource Development) report (educational status is an integral part of this report) issued by the UNDP is some where near the rock bottom. This...

Child Labour      Children constitute 36% of India’s population and it is national shame that bulk of them still suffer from malnutrition, poverty, disease, cruel exploitation through forced child labour and beggary and on top of all, illiteracy. Hundreds upon thousands of children roam the streets without homes in plenty to go back to and you can see them in plenty in streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad,...

Youth Power   Just utter their names Sachin Tendulkar, VishwanathanAnand, P.T. Usha, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupati, Aishwarya Rai, MadhuriDikshit and you get buoyed up. These are names that invoke the indomitable human spirit- souls born to win whatever be the odds. And indeed these could be hundreds upon thousands of others unknown heroes and heroines who have left their imprints on the sands of time. We owe the present to the...

Our Village Culture    Indian villages were never totally isolated. They paid taxes to rulers and chieftains, so they were always part of political system. And since there were constant wars their resources were also not exempt from looting and unplanned attacks by armies and robber bands. The External exigencies also had their impact. The US civil war in 1550, for instance forced textile factories in England to depend on cotton...

Education: Key to Success Before the coming of the British, India had an education system that could be traced back to 7000 years. The colonial rules replaced this with a system that suited their own interest which we inherited 55 years ago, when the new independent nation sought to create a new system of education, we had before us the vision of Nai Taleem’ born out of the very process of...

Population Explosion    Ask anyone who has lived in such big cities as Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Hydrabad, Bangalore, Kanpur, Ahmedabad or Pune since 1950 to compare the quality of life then and now. He will roll out to you the entire panorama of the paradise of sorts in which he lived more than half a century ago to the virtual hell in to which he has been dumped since the...

Communal Harmony  Essay No. 01 Fifty year on, the spectre of Communal Harmony still haunts us. We saw its macabre form during the trauma of partition. How far the British played `mischievous game in dividing Hindus and Muslims during the last phase of empire will be debated for decades to come. Separate electorate was the most pernicious practice which divided Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs. It struck a blow to the...

Universal Human Rights   We hear a lot about human rights the negative way, the way these rights are being denied, abused and compromised in India and in almost every other country subtly or overtly. Thanks to awareness, the proliferation of laws, the setting up of watch dog commissions and the prying eyes of all powerful media, abuses and violations of human rights are being exposed and the guilty pulled by...