On April 11, the union cabinet gave the go-ahead to conservation authorities to sign an mou with international counterparts to protect the dugong and its habitat. Indian efforts to conserve this virtually-unknown sea creature will get international recognition as a result. But this initiative has probably come too late.

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Look out of the window the next time you travel by road or by train anywhere in India. Hit a human settlement, and you will see, heaps of plastic coloured garbage apart, pools of dirty black water and drains that go nowhere. They go nowhere because we have forgotten a basic fact: if there are humans, there will be excreta. Indeed, we have also forgotten another truth about the so-called modern world: if there is water use, there will be waste. Roughly 80 per cent of the water that reaches households flows out as waste.

recently, the Indian Medical Association (ima) earned the dubious distinction of being the first association of medical professionals in the world to endorse a food brand. And that too of a company best known for its brands of non-nutritive and unsafe carbonated beverages. Going by the law of the land, this "endorsement' is illegal. The Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954 clearly makes it illegal to label foods as wothy of being recommended by the medical profession.

the common wisdom of electoral democracy might call for politicians, specialising in arithmetic, who can identify the biggest number. But the post-modern understanding of electoral politics may demand integrating a small number of voters whose limit to power is tending towards infinity! Let us look at how a few road dividers on a stretch of 19 km in Delhi have completely divided the urban classes (see page: 32-38).

there are those in India who don't get food. There are those that do. Then there are those that only get bad food. The cheapest available, but bad. It is this group which is bearing the brunt of increasing obesity and chronic diseases in the world. The experience of the African American community, living in poor areas and surviving on cheap fast food, is now global.

Little did I know that the seven of us would be branded "Maoists' when we set off for a protest rally against posco in Orissa on April 1. We had reached Bhubaneswar a day earlier and booked a taxi to Dhinkia, a hamlet 10 km off Paradip port. A local boy travelling with us sounded out the prospect of having to walk down the last kilometre by the coast to "avoid trouble'; he had information that a police vehicle was doing rounds of the area.

KANCHI KOHLI,    MANJU MENON

Ministers of the United Progressive Alliance government are often heard mouthing platitudes about inclusive growth. On the face of it, inclusive growth seems a democratic ideal. But platitudes aside, what does the ideal really translate into for farmers, fishworkers and tribals?

Extracts from Red Sun, Travels in Naxal Country by Sudeep Chakravarty