Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Mid-Day Meal: Scope of Improvement

  28 July 2013

  by Ritesh Dwivedi
  The National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE) was launched as a Centrally sponsored scheme on August 15, 1995, initially in 2408 blocks of the country. Today the NP-NSPE is the largest feeding programme covering about 12 crore children in over 9.50 lakh schools across the country. Barring a few, all States are providing 3 kg of wheat/rice per child per month. It was only after the directives of the Supreme Court that cooked Mid-Day Meal (…)

• Obituary: Kalpana Dutt

  28 July 2013, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  July 27 marks the legendary freedom fighter, Kalpana Dutt’s birth centenary. On this occasion we remember her and offer our sincere tribute to her abiding memory by reproducing the following piece N.C. wrote in her honour eighteen years ago in February 1995 following her demise on February 8 that year.
  On February 8 passed away in a Calcutta hospital a frail figure who sixty years ago became a legend in the classical mould. Kalpana Dutt, born in 1913 in a (…)

• Army Still Dominates Pakistan

  28 July 2013, by Kuldip Nayar

  It is an open secret that the Army in Pakistan is a peg or two higher than the civilian apparatus. But I saw chinks in its armoury when a commission report was leaked. That the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) could be “a collaborator” in hiding Osama bin Laden, the Taliban’s inspiration, was an insinuation which I thought the Army would not pocket without demur. But that happened.
  I was, however, reading too much into the leakage. Within a few days, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif went to (…)

• Modi’s Catch-22: Caught between Programme and Proclivity

  28 July 2013, by Badri Raina

  Come to think of it, imagine how many great souls have been done in by their eventual failure to balance within them the claims of nature and culture.
  Narendra Modi is clearly the latest, and perhaps the most dangerously acute, instance of the conundrum.
  Events since 2002 are proof that what comes naturally to Modi is to fight his smallness of mind, wrapped in outsized ambition, by donning a self-regarding “burqa” of paranoia, constructing enemies on a sustained basis, using what (…)

• The Survival of Humanity is at Stake

  28 July 2013

  by T. Sadashivam
  The issue of Development versus Environment has again come in the public discourse because of the Uttarakhand tragedy. Although the debate over development versus environment has been there since the past many decades, what added a new dimension to it was a term called ‘Climate Change’. According to the World Bank, a ‘climate change is a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity, a change that alters the composition of the global (…)

• Open Letter to PM and Tamil Nadu CM

  28 July 2013, by S G Vombatkere

  Sir and Madam,
  Today is a historic day for two wrong reasons. First, because on this day, July 16, 1945, the world’s first experimental nuclear explosion was conducted at Alamagorodo, USA, as a precursor to the next two nuclear experiments over Japan on August 6 and 8 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And second, for us in India, it immediately follows the Kudankulam nuclear power plant (KKNPP) going critical in contempt of the people’s well-founded fears for safety and health through calculated (…)

• Obama’s Monica Moment

  28 July 2013, by M K Bhadrakumar

  The following article, published in Asia Times in June, is reproduced here, with due acknowledgement, as its contents are still relevant.
  The United States may have administered one of the biggest-ever snubs to the Kremlin in the post-Cold War era with the White House announcement on Thursday that it will provide military support to the Syrian rebels.
  The announcement in Washington said:
  “Following a deliberative review, our [US] intelligence community assesses that the [Bashar al-] (…)

• Normalise the Abnormalcy in Jammu and Kashmir: A Way-out Framework

  28 July 2013

  by Showkat Ahmad
  The problem of Jammu and Kashmir has been with us ever since the accession of the state to the Indian Union in October 1947. Throughout the chequered history of the past six decades, Kashmir has been not just a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan but a testing ground of the secular, democratic and federal nature of the Indian Republic and the two-nation theory of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
  The year 2012 seemed to be the year of peace, normalcy, hot and dry season, (…)

• Justice Needed for Most Deprived among the OBCs

  28 July 2013, by Bharat Dogra

  The report of the Backward Classes Commission (popularly known as the Mandal Commission Report) was submitted in the year 1980. This report has been widely debated but an important aspect of this report has not received the due attention that it deserved. This is a minute of dissent by a member of the Commission, L.R. Naik. Despite his differences with Naik, B.P. Mandal, the Chairman of the Commission, had a special word of praise for him in the letter he wrote to the President while (…)

• Demystefying the Phenomenon of Terror

  28 July 2013, by Humra Quraishi

  MUSINGS
  With terror gaining ground, this book comes at an appropriate time. Not one of those typical books, but one with a difference—there are not just illustrative visuals but there are those backgrounders, to those vital basics to today’s terror. And it is authored by academic Ram Puniyani (he was earlier with the IIT, Mumbai), with illustrations by Sharad Sharma, founder of the World Comics Network.
  This book—Terrorism Explained: A Graphic Account—was launched here in the capital (…)