For seven-year-old Gopal Tanaji Vanwe, home is not one place. With his parents, migrant farm labourers, Gopal moves from district to district.

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It is an innocuous practice in offices in Uttar Pradesh to order tea from the nearest roadside dhaba. What is not so innocuous is how the tea is carried to these offices

The price of oil should be seen as part of a tax-subsidy framework, serving as part tax when global prices are low and part subsidy when they are high. S. SUBRAMANIUM IF THE GOVERNMENT is willing to compensate oil companies with resources mobilised through taxes on those who can afford to pay, rather than through price increases that burden the rich and the poor alike, prices can be held constant until such time that the inflationary situation is brought under control. Here, at a petrol bunk in New Delhi. A file photograph.

Tall, strapping and statuesque, Shivalli M. Chouhan, 34, doesn't look fat, but she insists she is. "It's not my self-image. It's what others tell me," smiles the civil servant with the Indian Defence Accounts Service. It's what her teacher had said long back when she was chosen for a television dance show in school. It's what some of her batchmates had whispered when she won those beauty contests in college and university. Resentful of the constant pressure of other people's unending desire for her to be thin she decided to excel in everything else but looks.

As the head of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been caught like a doe between covert economics and overt populism. No surprise then that the Government chose to issue a press release with blank spaces, on the "marginal" hike effected on petrol, diesel and cooking gas. Clearly, the Government is finding it tough to do its math in a manner that it can convince consumers already hard hit by 8.1 per cent inflation. It has no qualms making the aam aadmi pay more for everything, rather than lose out on its own revenues.

Sukhdev Singh, 30, a contract labourer from village Kharakha in Sikar district in rural Haryana was desperate to get married. His parents, Hasan Ram and Ranu Bai, had tried to find a match for him but after seven fruitless years they finally gave up. The reason for the shortage of brides lies in Haryana's sex ratio which is acutely skewed with 861 females for every thousand males. In other words, out of every hundred males, 14 would be unable to find a bride. The brunt of this problem is felt the most by poor, rural males.

Aureole Publishing Price: $35, Pages: 151 A wildlife tour of Rajasthan's most prominent national park and tiger reserve, with striking pictures and informative stories of the great cats sighted at play in their deciduous domain.

It used to be one of the most unforgettable sights from the height of the Indian summer: thousands of the world-famous Olive Ridley turtles waddling out of the water to nest and breed on the pristine white sand beaches of Gahirmatha in Orissa on magical, moonlit nights. Not just the Olive Ridleys, most other species of turtle also emerge of their hibernation spanning winters and begin mating and looking for proper nesting places.

Your money or your lives: sounds like a standard clich

At around 11 a.m., Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar eagerly awaits an SMS. No, the message is not about the Indian Premier League. It is from his officials who send him the scores on a day-to-day basis on harvesting and procurement of foodgrain. Last week, as his slim mobile phone silently whirred, he checked the message and smiled to himself. His department had set a new record by procuring 210 lakh tonne