Journalist and novelist. Corporate wife and mother. Now, armed with a fortune from Infosys’ meteoric rise, Rohini Nilekani is intent on helping India’s poor.
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Uncommon Ground – For The Children Of India
The debate has shifted to higher studies, but we I cannot afford to take the foot off the pedal on early education.
In this, the final column in this series, I turn to a core area of my work over the past decade—the education and development of young children.
Some sights and sounds remain sharply etched in the mind—the five-year-old in a preschool that we had set up in a Bangalore slum, who cheerily sang a rhyme about butterflies but said she had never seen one; the little children in the fields in Bettiah, who looked like they were just playing, but in actuality were catching tiny fish from the ponds for their dinner; the 10-year-old boy who stood outside a school in Kolar, but could not bridge the social distance to get in.
Uncommon Ground – A Fine Balance in Kutch
There’s a massive export of virtual water from dry regions to wet, through the sale of both milk and meat products.
on work, with soaring temperatures and no promise of rain despite an unusual cloud cover. We travelled a couple of hundred kilometres in the clay desert, despairing at the spread of Prosopis juli-flora which — like so many other
foreign species brought in by the forest department with all good intentions—has now overpowered large tracts of the countryscape, to the detriment of useful, hardy local species.
Uncommon Ground – Mind The Gender Gap
Not only does violence against women continue in the old brutality, it is taking new bewildering forms.
Twenty-five years ago, I used to volunteer with Vimochana, a women’s group that focuses on violence against women. At that time in Bangalore, dowry deaths were particularly disturbing, and much work was being done to raise awareness about the issue. On a day when papers reported five cases of unnatural deaths of women in the city, I had cccasion to catch up with Vimochana’s indefatigable Donna and Madhu again.
Uncommon Ground – A Conflict Of Paradigms
The demand for limited fresh water has brought the issue to the centre of the debate on development.
At summertime, thoughts turn naturally to water. For millions of citizens, especially women, it is a time of extreme shortage, and for ever more creative coping mechanisms. Many states have improved access to lifeline water, but there is still a long way to go.
In terms of total availability of fresh water, things are not going to improve. Even though water is a renewable resource, it is finite, and per capita availability of water in India has gone down from 6,008 cu. m. in 1947 to 1,820 cu. m. in 2001—it will dip further over the next 30 years.
Uncommon Ground – Rising From The Ashes
There is a growing consensus that this crisis is unlike any other, that it’s a discontinuity with potential for great change.
The airy cafe at London’s British Museum, just across a hallway exhibiting newly discovered mummies of sacred animals from ancient Egypt, was the perfect place to chat with John Elkington about the Phoenix Economy.
John, who coined the phrase “triple bottom line”, to include not just profits, but people and the planet, now believes that a new business ethos will rise from the ashes of the current crisis.
Uncommon Ground – Next Wave of Voluntarism?
For India’s sake as much as its own, Bihar needs to be strong, less vulnerable to forces that deny democracy.
In parts of Bihar, such as the district of Gaya, ironically famous for its Buddhist tourism, Maoists have threatened to chop off the hands of anyone who dares to vote. This is slightly more of a deterrent than the rainstorms most of us can expect. For Maoists in Bihar, such threats are routine but necessary. They have much to lose from a free and fair poll. Especially in these elections.
Uncommon Ground – Bringing The State Back In
There are just too many millions below the scope of ‘efficient’ markets and beyond the reach of most NGOs.
Whenever the family travelled together, while most of us would admire the greenery, my father-in-law would sigh ecstatically over the beauty of the giant pylons striding across the fields. To him, they represented the engineering talent and achievements of the public sector, munificently straddling the commanding heights of the economy.
Uncommon Ground – Good Growth, Bad Growth
A question: is this economic slowdown improving the value of the environmental economy?
As a family, we are not much into buying things recklessly. Although we live very well, we only buy things that we know will be used. My motherin-law and my son take this to a sort of extreme. They will only have limited sets of clothing which have to go through the wash regularly to serve them. No argument can convince them to create redundancy.