A check-dam in coastal Gujarat sweetened water and changed farmers' lives. Now, another change is coming, a cement factory over the reservoir and the villagers are on the warpath.
Things are so bad at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country's premier government-run hospital and medical college that it is nearly impossible to think good or do good. Vishnu Surekha, a businessman with a good heart, wanted a little space for setting up a charitable pharmacy inside the premises to help the poor.
Two years behind schedule, the common service centre (CSC) project is floundering. There are few success stories and no one tells you where Rs 5,742 crore of public funds are going.
R Chandrasekhar, IAS officer of Andhra Pradesh cadre, is credited with establishing India's first department of information technology (DIT) in his home state. The architect of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), he is also regarded as the father of e-governance in India and has won the prime minister's award for public services. Edited excerpts from an interview with him.
If we cannot spruce up our PDS, the author Manisha Priyam argues, we can wind it up because some Latin American countries have come up with a very workable system; direct cash transfer rather than help in kind.
Dr Alok Shukla is among those civil servants who received awards for excellence in public administration from the prime minister on April 21. As secretary, food and civil supplies department, Chhattisgarh, he, along with two of his colleagues, has been credited with turning the much-maligned PDS into a success story.
Reversing wrongs could be a better idea than throwing rights at people whose strength is used up entirely in the daily struggle against exclusion. Running to courts to enforce their rights is not even on the periphery of their consciousnes
