The streets are no place for their young lives to play out AT 13, Satender Sharma ran away from home to escape an abusive father. His father beat the entire family mercilessly and even killed his mother by hitting her head into a wall. To get away from a life of more abuse, a petrified…
CHANGE leaders do great things, and often that is all we know about them. Here we want to get a different glimpse of the personalities that constitute the development space. Every month we get one leader to answer four questions, not necessarily about their work, but about themselves. This week we catch up with Ashok…
By SANJANA PEGU | NEWSLAUNDRY —- THE Indian state currently recognises me as an NRI which, as any non mainland Indian will tell you, is slightly bemusing since our relations with India has always been one of estrangement. Personally, my feelings towards the Indian nation state is moody and tenuous, somewhere between like and dislike,…
India caught the world’s eye when a recent UN report declared that more than half of the nation’s population is under the age of 25, accounting for more than 600 million people. With a major segment of its people constituting of children and youth, India surely seems to be on its way to a bright…
Let us revisit a small tale from the Mahabharata to get a better understanding of the term “Akshaya Patra”. This goes back to the time when the Pandavas and queen Draupadi were living in exile. In those days, a lot of their acquaintances used to visit them in the forest which formed their temporary residence.…
India’s duel with poverty has been going on for decades. With the nation being home to one-third of the world’s poor for a long time, it has never been easy for the larger part of our population to make ends meet. The country’s impoverished state has also played a major driver of the total illiteracy…
IN a country which is home to the largest number of illiterate adults in the world, the story of a 96-year-old grandmother sitting for the first exam of her life earlier this month warmed the cockles of many hearts. Karthyayani Amma of Cheppad, in Kerala’s Alappuzha district was one of 40,440 people to take a…
In one of my earlier jobs, when I raised an objection to something wrong being done, one of my colleagues had adviced, “If you want to advance in your career, you need to keep your middle-class values aside.” I tried to do it too but in the end, decided that those values are the principles…
CHANGE leaders do great things, and often that is all we know about them. Here we want to get a different glimpse of the personalities that constitute the development space. Every month we get one leader to answer four questions, not necessarily about their work, but about themselves. This week we catch up with Ashif…
By VENKAT KRISHNAN N —- I HAD an interesting conversation with a seasoned development professional some years back, as he held forth on why ‘charity is bad and development is good’. “Imagine,” he said, “that you are standing by a river, and you see a baby floating by, obviously thrown into the water and likely to…