The TV serial of the late 1980s is now available as a video series. Although its message of self reliance is a bit dated, it still is a useful mix of science, history and social development.

For R S Hegde, a primary school principal and rural technologist, science is useless if it remains confined to labs and libraries.

"A plant in the backyard has no value," says an Indian proverb. This attitude, which has been the bane of Indian society -- and that of the nations of the South -- repeatedly tends to overlook the

A MAJOR preoccupation of developing countries that have undergone the colonial experience is to avoid, at any cost, the substitution of political colonialism with economic colonialism. An important

IF ONE were to pick a single product to represent the tremendous technological progress in the second half of this century, it would certainly be the computer. In few fields has progress been so