Brain drain
Consuming vegetables contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides can lower a child's intelligence, warns a study
The secret garden
Want to know about a lost variety of rice or a cure to asthma? Answers lie in the notebooks of schoolchildren and women of the Sundarbans and …
Gasping millions
Asthma, the bane of modern life, stalks the young ones and the affluent. It will strike 32 million people in India by 2010. The silent strangler …
Billowing Rage
The Sukruli cauldron threatens to boil over if the Orissa government does not act against the smoke-spewing sponge iron plant in the area.
Hazardous votes
Parents' keepsake
The world's first mummies arsenic poisoning victims in Chile in 5000 BC
Children's swaraj
Karnataka turns governance into child's play with kids' assemblies
Making of a toy
On skype with Barry Matthew Kudrowitz, an instructor on toy design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Beginning with his favourite, …
The unaccounted wealth that leaves our shores
The Indian government invests Rs 34 lakh to educate each IIT graduate. It therefore has the moral authority to get him or her to work for the …
Babies can tell nice guys
Education must boost unity, end superstition
Learning in the present social context should lay more stress on inculcating social and ethical values that would bring Indians closer to each other.
Early education is the key to reducing birth rate
Every rupee invested on four years of primary education for girls would yield returns worth Rs 10 of investment on advertising contraceptive …
If words were deeds
If a recently-held seminar on the Girl Child in the capital is any indication, her plight is not going to improve in a hurry.
Children of the earth, worshippers of nature
Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan human rights activist and peasant leader, was awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Menchu was witness to the …
Grasping the roots
Environmental literature plays an important role in moulding innocent minds to think and understand green.
The greening of young minds
Environment education cannot be confined to plants and animals or even conservation; its aim must be to open to children the interconnectedness …
Our country, our mess
How's India doing in providing basic social services?
Shaky foundations
Plasticky!
Europe is debating a ban on PVC due to environmental and health concerns. Industry is fighting back with a high-profile campaign
Breathing easy
A hundred medicines, a dozen therapies but no cure, that is the story of asthma treatment world wide. Complementary medicine fill the vacuum
Hindustan motors
Can India ever have car-free centres?
More dreams sans cars
From a loose concept to a concrete movement, the idea of the car-free city has evolved gradually
Owning the road
Cities without cars, pollution and traffic. A movement is spreading across Europe to drive cars out. People are beginning to say no to cars
Heady music
Colour clues