At least 67 people have died and many sustained burn injures in the fire triggered by bomb blasts in Delhi- Attari Samjhauta Express on February 18, near Deewana in Panipat in Haryana. The bi-weekly train literally means 'Understanding,' a symbol pf Friendship, connects New Delhi to Pakistan's city of Lahore. The attacks took place ahead of Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri’s visit to New Delhi for talks with his Indian counterpart on Tuesday. Kasuri is scheduled to co-chair the India-Pak Joint Commission in New Delhi.

Providing access to safe drinking water to all is being the prime target of each country’s development goal as prescribes by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The contentious issue is who will provide this basic service- public or private.

More than a decade of opening of India, the Special Economic Zone (SEZ), probably has become the most controversial economic reforms announced in recent time. While some consider it as India’s supersonic engine of growth, others severely criticize it as the latest land grab instrument in the hands of the industrialists. Serious discourses on models of development, displacement and rehabilitation, employment generation, foreign investment, primacy of industry over agriculture are being raised in justification as well as against the whole concept of SEZ.

Democracy is the most widely admired political system, but perhaps the most difficult to maintain. Democracy begins with excellent objectives in human governance with unquestionable intensions to impart freedom from injustice and social exclusion. It is characterised as a system in which expectations are raised because people identify themselves with the polity. There has been a greater urge for opening up the space for participation and competition in a state like Nepal which had a long history of monarchical domination.

Where Coal is gold, children’s education can be dumped! This has been followed by the mining-savvy Orissa government in a small Matulu Camp village-as the name suggests, a resettled habitation, in Rengali block of Sambalpur district in Orissa. There was a ‘school’, up to class 5th in this village just three years ago. But, the school is now reminding a World War-II concentration camp, where about 100 children of ten classes are being forced inside a dingy 20/15 ft room community centre building.

India’s space research programme has leaped to a new high with the successful launch of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C7) from Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, carrying four satellites, including a recoverable spacecraft on January 10, 2007. This group of four satellites constituted of two Indian makes and two foreign satellites. The foreign satellites belong to the category of micro and nano satellites weighing 56 and six kg respectively.

Every consent is manufactured on the basis of the kind of information disseminated. With the revolution in Information Technology (IT), public perception is shaped in varied ways on varied aspects for varied lengths. However, some issues tend to remain in vogue in the public domain for decades owing to its perceived relative impact on the human civilization. Here, the kind and the nature of information disseminated on a phenomenon is crucial than the real nature of the phenomenon itself. One such example is the idea of nuclear technology.

Following the high profile assassinations of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB (erstwhile Soviet Union’s secret service-Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) agent in November 2006, the British investigators found that Litvinenko’s killers used polonium-210, a rare radioactive element worth over $10 million to poison him.

India has put its first successful step in the arena of ballistic missile defence by conducting a successful but a surprise test of new interceptor missile in late November over the Bay of Bengal. This missile, named as AXO (Atmospheric Intercept System), was fired from the Wheeler Islands off Chandipur in Orissa. In fact, AXO is a modified version of Prithvi-II specially manufactured for this test. It intercepted another surface-to-surface Prithvi-II missile.

With a growing economy, an increasing population, India’s energy demands is mounting. The household sector is the largest consumer of energy in India, accounting for 40-50 percent of the total energy consumption in the country. In rural areas, the domestic sector accounts for nearly 80 percent of total energy consumption. It has been estimated that with the current rate of consumption, India would require over 450 million tones of coal, 94 million tones of oil and 220 million units of electricity by 2006 to sustain its energy needs.