Mar 2006

A long look at a small vegetable. Growing gherkins for Western palates has brought in good money for some farmers in Karnataka. But, buried in the soil are more issues to be tackled than meets the eye. Keya Acharya does some digging around.
It is a small, slim vegetable, about
two inches long, not palatable with
Indian diets but important enough to have journalists from Switzerland come to Karnataka’s gherkin-growing fields and take a look at them.

May be not. If we learn from China’s grim lessons on water, we will front-page this ministry’s doings often.

Can distribution of water be in people’s hands—not the government’s?
Roopmati behn was at her tether’s end. It was six months since her husband had paid a tariff connection cost of Rs. 3700/- to the Water Supply Board, officially. The minions in the water department had been paid ‘speed money’ of another Rs. 6000/- over three more months to get the house pipe connection laid.

A thousand villages in Karnataka alone are to be denied of support on drinking water programmes, thanks to the government’s unwillingness to let go on donor funds...

There is a quiet exit of a well-known institution that is now taking place across several districts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. More than 3000 villages, which have benefited from development programmes that brought drinking water to these villages and to over three million people in these districts, are now going to have to look elsewhere for such relief.