Sabita Kaushal

Charge fees, use funds to clean Yamuna: NGT 

India set to become water scarce in 10 years time: Govt tells Parliament

What do these two iconic figures -- Shivaji, the great Maratha leader and Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the ‘Iron Man of India’ -- have most in common? While one might think that it was their fight for the freedom of their motherland, albeit at different times, that is not all.

Every 10 years, the government gears up to capture colossal amounts of data through its Census.

"Kangra Fort was so well guarded that it was safer to enter ‘leg first’", says the present scion of the erstwhile Katoch family ( Kat means sword,

All the world’s a stage and all men and women players in it, said Shakespeare. Kathputli Colony in Delhi is living testimony to this. ‘Kath’ means wood and ‘putli’ is the Hindi word for a doll or puppet.

Traditional water mills or gharats as they are called in the hilly regions of Himachal Pradesh were once found in nearly every village. Today these mechanisms that use running water to grind wheat, rice and maize and also occassionally to extract oil, have been replaced by electricity run mills.

Chhatrapati Shivaji was the brave warrior king whose name is still synonymous with Maharashtra. A military genius par excellence, he launched guerrilla warfare (ambushes, surprise raids, and hit & run tactics) against the numerically superior but inert, traditional Mughal forces.

An engineer or an ecologist talking about water may not cause many heads to turn, but when they do it through poetry, there is a chance that more people will take notice.

Every school going child knows that the earth is called the Blue Planet, because nearly 70% of its surface is covered with water. All pictures of the earth show a blue green earth, dotted by land masses. So how would we explain the idea of water scarcity to them?