Amiddle-aged woman whose only trips out of home have been to the neighbourhood grocer’s store describes what it means to suddenly become the sole bread earner. A man whose first act after buying a fridge is to cut off his neighbour’s electricity connection.

Many see slums as failed parts of cities. They are regarded as parts of a city that do not conform to ruling ideas of an ideal city held by people in other parts of the city. There have been some changes in the way people have looked at slums ever since colonial cities emerged.

HAKAM SINGH, 59, runs a taxi business near the Inter State Bus Terminus at Kashmere Gate in New Delhi. He sits in a one-room office that overlooks the long rows of neatly parked black and yellow cabs. From morning till night, every day, he tends to phone calls while calculating judicious use of the taxis ensuring customer satisfaction.

RUSHATI SARKAR is a final year graduate student in Kolkata. Since her mother succumbed to vaginal cancer, she fears a similar fate. She also abhors the idea of going for invasive tests. Fortunately for her, scientists at the Stanford School of Medicine in USA could not have made their discovery any sooner.

WITH the Indian government’s pledge of generating 20 gigawatts of power from solar energy by 2020, about US $20 billion must be invested in developing infrastructure. Everyone wants to know which technology gets the largest piece of the cake.

When an invention gets experts as varied as photographers, heart researchers, biotechnologists, physicists, security strategists and academicians interested, it merits discussion.

Computing profit and loss of Metro projects is tricky. Such projects all over the world are known for running into a loss. These capital-intensive projects cost between Rs 110 crore and 210 crore per km of elevated corridors.

Sonika Gupta, 29, who lives in Delhi’s Geeta Colony troubles her husband every morning to drop her to Yamuna Bank Metro Station on his motorbike; there is no bus service to the station, which is four km from her house.

Metro trains in Delhi have four coaches and a maximum capacity of 1,400 commuters. The frequency of trains ranges from 5 minutes during peak hours to 25 minutes on some corridors. Overcrowding is turning out to be a major problem, primarily during rush hour.

Chikungunya fever, caused by infection with mosquito borne alphavirus is an acute nonfatal illness characterized by fever, rash, myalgia, arthralgia and sometimes inflammatory arthritis. During 2007, central