Passionate About India

In Chattisgarh, more crpf jawans get killed by mosquito bites than by Maoists! Yes, that’s the ironic piece of research my friend Prasoon dug out for his article in the last issue of The Sunday Indian! It does tell a big story. Of course, on one hand it tells the pitiable story of our CRPF jawans, as Prasoon pointed out in his article last week. Thanks to the Maoist attack recently, which left 75 dead, the government suddenly is feeling concerned about the jawans’ lives! However, before this incident, in the last two years over a hundred of them had died of malaria, which was more than the numbers killed on duty. But previously, of course, the government was not concerned about the lives of jawans because malarial deaths obviously don’t happen in a dramatic newsworthy manner. Is it not ironic that our paramilitary forces die more of curable diseases than of bullets? Well, that’s the crux of India's problems. That more CRPF jawans are today scared to die of malaria than of Maoist b...

Poor Lalit Modi. He went a little too fast with his scam and partied a little too hard in front of public eyes. As per a confidential income tax report, he bought a luxury yacht, a private jet, a fleet of Mercedes S-class cars and what not! All in the last three years! He gave every possible deal to do with IPL to his relatives and family and friends or to people whom he owed money – so that they don’t come behind him. Again, this is as per that report which came out in The Economic Times. More, he took personal stakes in disguise in three of the IPL teams and is supposed to have been himself involved in fixing the outcomes of IPL matches along with a prominent page 3 personality; again according to the same report. He is linked to Betfair – a UK firm that runs one of the world’s largest betting syndicates on the internet – and is helping it to enter the casino and hospitality business in India! This is what the Income Tax Department scooped out from Lalit Modi’s email box. And all thi...

We, at Planman Media, have been always very appreciative and excited about any policy that has ever made an attempt to bring in any substantial change in the state of Indian education – especially in primary education. Be it the annual budget or discreet policy decisions, education has always been our primary area of focus and inspection. There are two reasons for the same. Firstly, the returns on investment (in terms of societal dividends) on primary education, including intangibles, are very high; and secondly, knowing the fact that the returns are high, it is the very same primary education which has been subjected to perpetual political negligence and budgetary ignorance over the years. But then, with the introduction of the Right to Education bill (on April 01, 2010) the table seems to be finally turning. This act, at least on paper, holds the promise to deliver free and compulsory education to one and all, till the age of 14, across the nation. On the face of it, I feel too exci...

When I got to know about the plan of the current government to pass the Right to Food Act, I went through a series of feelings. First it was dismay, followed by optimism, further followed by despair. For the first few minutes, I kept wondering why did it take so much time to provide the most basic and fundamental right to the citizens of this country? It is not that we have become self sufficient with respect to food only recently; on the contrary, we as a nation have secured food sufficiency since decades, but still allowed food grains to decay in our godowns, and not let them reach those who have been starving to death! Anyway, considering that it is better late than never, I felt that finally the common man and his poorer cousins were getting more attention from the government, which had been too engrossed in trying to save India Inc. from recession. I felt happy because this particular bill becomes even more pertinent at this point in time as the prices of food grains and cereals ...