India Together

11 March 2025 - What is urban life? If we seek liveable cities, we must ask first what urban life is. Is it just a question of ensuring that livelihoods, shelter, mobility, health, and other factors of a good life are available and accessible? Or is there a dimension that is more profound? It is worth dwelling on this question for even though cities have existed since time immemorial the study of cities as a focused discipline came into being quite recently.

22 October 2024 - Did you know that plastic bottles and polyester pants are essentially made of the same material? Or that if you made a dye from onion peels, it would not be pink but yellow? Or that several ingredients in cosmetics come from fossil fuels (the same oil from which we get petrol)? Or that natural Indigo dye bleeds but a chemically manufactured one does not? I didn't, until I attended a Material Literacy workshop a couple of weeks back.

24 August 2024 - A Constitution Bench of the court led by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud recently ruled that the states of India have the power to levy taxes on mining, and that this power has not been curtailed by a national law enacted in 1957. The states have also been permitted to exercise their powers retrospectively, allowing them to claim royalties from 2005 onwards. However, mining companies have been allowed to stagger the payments over the course of a decade.

Most rural women work on farms, but only one in six owns the land she works on. Succession laws have brought women on par with men when it comes to family property, but when it comes to inheriting agricultural land, discrimination still persists. Shikha Sharma reports. 16 November 2021 - In the 75 years since Independence, there has been some increase in agency for India's women.

Facing an acute shortage of doctors in rural areas, the state government hopes that some of their work could be done by pharmacists instead. But public health advocates are not so sure, and want a number of other steps they believe could be more effective. Sweta Dash reports.