Public Infrastructure and Services

For almost two decades, the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act of 1993 was a paralytic occupant of the statute books. The Act prohibited the construction of dry toilets which required faeces to be removed manually and outlawed manual scavenging.

At sunrise, everything is luminous but not clear. 

― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

Originally a darya (creek), locally known as Nizammuddin darya, Barapullah is a key drain of Delhi today. Barapullah gets its name from a pul (bridge) built across it by the then emperor Jahangir's chief eunuch, Mihir Banu Agha.

The cracks on the parched land of Bundelkhand are waiting for the monsoon to quench the thirst of its arid landscape. Despite the wide-spread drought here, Pipara, one of the villages in the region, stands apart as the only one that has not run completely dry. 

Vikram Patel, a 71-year-old farmer in Chidavad village of Dewas district in Madhya Pradesh is one of the first farmers to have embraced the idea of farm ponds to increase the groundwater level in his farm.

Ramesh Mali, a farmer in his late thirties, looks at his farmland nervously. It has been 13 days since the Simhastha Maha Kumbh festival, 2016, concluded. The district administration had acquired his four bigha land (approximately 0.64 hectares) for the festival. The barricades and the concrete left on his land give us the idea that the land is not fit for farming this season.

“When I was a boy, a family and their livestock could feed on just one crop for three years,” says Jugal Mandal of Sakhwar village in Darbhanga district. “For the last five years though, the village fields have been fallow because we have not had water,” he adds.

The Madhya Simhastha Maha Kumbh festival, the religious extravaganza that happens once in every 12 years, was held in Ujjain from April 22-May 21, 2016.

It would not be an exaggeration to say Subarnarekha (Line of gold) is a film that left an indelible mark on Indian cinema. The film, by Ritwik Ghatak, is inspired by a river by the same name and narrates the reality around the river which flows through the present day Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, before draining into the Bay of Bengal.

‘Jat’ reservation and the rampage on a canal