Innholdsfortegnelse for December 30, 2024 i India Today

You could have dismissed it as a pretender challenging the stately Ambassador, or its more modern-looking competitor Pad, as the Premier Padmini or the Fiat was often called. But the Maruti 800, named so after its 800cc engine, proved to be a worthy David to the Goliaths produced respectively by Hindustan Motors and Premier Automobiles, eventually wiping their cars out of existence. Maruti 800 proved that a car did not have to be an item of luxury, it was a good essential for personal mobility. Its affordability, floor-shift gears and bucket seats, and reliability, made it deserving of the moniker of a ‘people’s car’. A perfect fit for the aspirational nuclear family of middle-class India looking to upgrade from two-wheeler to car. The car itself was the culmination of Sanjay…

A one-woman revolution. You wouldn’t have expected it in the frail frame of Bhanwari Devi. Or in Bhateri, a Rajasthani hamlet 52 km east of Jaipur. But it was exactly in this heart of patriarchy, where women wore purdah and community elders married off children in their infancy, that Bhanwari, a sathin (assistant) for a state government awareness programme, intervened to prevent the marriage of a nine-month-old girl. For her daring, a lower caste Kumhar woman taking on the superior Gurjars, she was punished, in the way caste and patriarchal wrath has often been visited upon women—with gangrape, in the presence of her husband. Where lesser women would have withdrawn, Bhanwari took up her own fight, lodging an FIR, submitting herself to a medical examination, and surrendering her soiled lehenga as…

In the dusty lanes of Devdungri, Rajasthan, a revolution quietly took root. Peasants, led by the fiery resolve of Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), demanded access to muster rolls—mundane employment records that held the secret to systemic corruption. Their demand for transparency soon ballooned into a national movement, culminating in the groundbreaking law, the Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005. Pushed by Sonia Gandhi and the National Advisory Council, of which Roy was also a member, this legislation was enacted by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government under prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2005. The Act became a cornerstone of India’s democratic architecture, granting citizens the legal right to access information from public authorities. By dismantling the pervasive culture of secrecy,…

A thick, velveteen canopy that shuts out the sun in layers of foliage, creepers, ferns and lichen making up the thick undergrowth that carpets the ground beneath, the Silent Valley is a natural wonder—an 89 sq. km tropical rainforest at the heart of the Nilgiri biosphere reserve in the Western Ghats in Kerala’s Palakkad district and a repository of hundreds of rare varieties of flora and fauna. Long before the destruction of the Amazon rainforest became a global cause celebre, environmental activists, poets, journalists and concerned citizens united to save this ecological hotspot from the jaws of ‘development’. In the early 1970s, the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) proposed a hydroelectric dam across the Kunthipuzha river that ran through the forests. The dam would have submerged 8.3 sq. km of the…

“The mission for cleanliness is not one day’s, it is a life-long tradition. We have to take it forward for generations”—NARENDRA MODI Prime Minister of India Cholera, polio, typhoid, hepatitis…India had long grappled with an embarrassing richness of diseases that spread through the faecal-oral route because of poor sanitation in the country. And children below the age of five bore the brunt of these diseases. In 2014, India’s infant mortality ratio (IMR) stood at 38 per 1,000 live births and the under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) at 45. Today, IMR stands reduced to 28, while U5MR was 32 in 2020. And a recent study published in the journal Nature, which analysed data from 35 Indian states and 640 districts between 2011 and 2020, attributes it to one factor: the Swachh Bharat Mission.…

In the late ’70s, when Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer came in with his millions to stir up the old world rhythms of cricket, it must have felt like a blast of rock music at a country do. Day-night matches, helmets, coloured clothing—the purists called it a “circus”. But it brought in big money. Enough to attract star players, even if it was beyond the pale of cricket law. But if Packer was like a casino, the Indian Premier League was all of Las Vegas. Big and brash on a scale that happens only in India, it was a monsoon wedding of entertainment and commerce—there was, er, ladies sangeet too. Cricket in India was already a rich princely state eyeing the empire, but the IPL still pulled off the Packer’s…

"Oo la la la la leyo!” Advertisement jingles couldn’t get any catchier than this Caribbean calypso tune from 1996, aired during the biggest sporting event in the country that year—the cricket World Cup. It was the theme that Kingfisher Premium, India’s top-selling beer, tapped into—with canny surrogate advertising—to establish itself as a cool, stylish, aspirational brand at a time when the beer biggies of the world were eyeing the Indian market. The Kingfisher label itself was new beer in old bottles, so to speak, because it had been around since 1857. Owned by United Breweries (UB), the credit for digging out this defunct label from the company archives and relaunching it in 1978 goes to Vijay Mallya, then a 23-year-old doing a mentorship detail at the beer company run by…

Spencer Plaza was India’s first shopping mall when it opened in 1991 on Chennai’s Mount Road. Built on the 10-acre site of a late 19th century Indo-Saracenic architectural landmark—itself a department store which had some 80 shops when it first started—that had burnt to the ground in a fire in 1983, it was an instant hit with Chennaiites, as much for the glitzy shops as an escape from the torpor and heat (central air-conditioning was still a novelty). This was the country’s first mega mall, a precursor to the concrete and glass, temperature-controlled transformation of Indian retail shopping that has swept through the metros and B-towns of the country. The malls have revolutionised the way India’s middle-class shops. Compared to the crowded bazaars of, say, Chandni Chowk in Delhi or…

A labour of love executed over two decades, photographer Prashant Panjiar’s Kumbh book is out in time for the upcoming Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj (Jan. 13-Feb. 26, 2025). Panjiar first went to the Kumbh in 2001. “The idea of an ancient almost primordial mega event in a ‘futuristic’ connected global world was extremely seductive. I came back from the festival with many images that lived up to the image of it being the ‘greatest show on earth’,” he says. Panjiar returned for the Ardh Kumbhs of 2007 and 2019 and the Maha Kumbh of 2013. The result is a unique, large-format book featuring 48 black-and-white panoramic photographs, shot entirely on film. While Panjiar used a Widelux camera borrowed from Raghu Rai during the 2001 Kumbh, for the subsequent melas…

Gone are the days when cookie-cutter travel experiences were the norm. The new-age traveller seeks immersive holidays, where culture, cuisine and craft take centre stage. If it’s not just Agra, Jaipur or Goa that vie for your attention, there’s a world of hand-picked journeys to choose from—all led by qualified travel experts. Pugdundee Safaris For walking and mobile safaris in Madhya Pradesh Navigating through national parks by jeep is a common experience. But what if you get to dive into the wilderness of the jungle on foot? That’s what Pugdundee Safaris specialises in. These walking and mobile safaris through the Satpura Tiger Reserve led by trained naturalists offer an adrenaline-packed adventure, taking you through thick jungles, rugged hills, and tribal villages. The experience is as rustic as it can get—there…

In 2003, Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar Gopinath, a retired captain of the Indian Army, introduced Indians to what at first sounded like an oxymoron: lowcost airline. In the India of the 1990s and the early noughties, flying was the preserve of the well-heeled. The others took trains. Gopinath imagined an India where airlines did just one job: transport people from one place to another without making a big deal out of it. Thus he started Air Deccan with a flight from Bangalore to Hubbali in Karnataka on August 25, 2003. It was a domestic carrier minus the meal service, plush seats and the sundry other bells and whistles that full-service carriers of the time, like Indian Airlines and Jet Airways, offered. Suddenly, the ordinary Indian could dream of flying. A bus…

Before July 10, 1988, the idea of business-class train travel was alien to most Indians. Train journeys were largely utilitarian, and long-distance premium travel was dominated by the Rajdhani Express, launched about two decades prior and connecting the national capital to Calcutta and Bombay at the time. All other trains made way for its passage, reinforcing its status as the pinnacle of Indian Railways. Then came the Shatabdi Express in 1988, breaking the mould and redefining rail travel. Designed as a point-to-point service with minimal stops, it achieved a top speed of 150 kmph, making it the fastest train in India. Modelled after air travel, it featured plush reclining seats and onboard meals served by stewards, all included in the ticket price. The Shatabdi was a glimpse into the future,…

As the news unfolded on that cold night on December 16, 2012, a whole country felt a visceral pain in the pit of its stomach. A young 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, out on a casual movie night, boarded a private bus in national capital Delhi that evening, unaware of the unimaginable horror that lay in wait. She came to be called Nirbhaya, the fearless one, but we can never know the deep fear she must have felt when six men brutally gang-raped and assaulted her, leaving her with injuries so severe that she succumbed to them a few days later. The sheer savagery of the act—a metal rod inserted into her and her intestines pulled out, her naked body shoved into the street—jolted the entire country, sparking nationwide protests, with millions…

The Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement, signed in 2008, marked a transformative moment in India’s diplomatic and strategic history. Also known as the 123 Agreement, it not only signified a new era in India-US relations but also had profound implications for India’s energy and technological ambitions. The deal sought to undo India’s isolation from international nuclear trade and the global sanctions it faced after it conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998. Despite restrictions, India refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), asserting that it was discriminatory. However, India maintained an impeccable record in non-proliferation and developed a robust indigenous nuclear programme. In the early 2000s, as India’s economy grew, its energy demands skyrocketed. Nuclear energy emerged as a solution to address this but shortage of Uranium was a stumbling…

“We were the first team to climb the Siachen glacier and plant India’s flag. It was a proud moment and marked the beginning of India’s claim to the region”—COL. NARENDRA ‘BULL’ KUMAR, whose expeditions to Siachen served as a pathfinder to Meghdoot The stark setting tells half the story: the icy wastes of the Siachen Glacier in northern Ladakh and the commanding heights and mountain passes around it, with an average altitude of 20,000 feet. Starting from April 13, 1984, the Indian Army, ably ferried and supplied by the Indian Air Force, secured the glacier, of immense strategic importance, for the nation under Operation Meghdoot. It is a high point in Indian military history, for seldom has the fortitude of our fighting men been tested in such punishing terrain and climate.…

By the late 1980s, India’s political structure was grappling with systemic challenges. Development programmes launched in the name of rural upliftment were floundering, stymied by inefficiencies, corruption and a glaring disconnect between policy and the grassroots. Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), envisioned in Article 40 of the Directive Principles, were largely symbolic entities, hamstrung by irregular elections, inadequate financial powers and captured by the elite. The urban landscape was equally fragmented, with municipalities undermined by state interference, fiscal insolvency and ad-hoc governance. Rajiv Gandhi, buoyed by a massive electoral mandate in 1984, sought to change that. The Panchayati Raj and Nagar Palika Bills, finally introduced in 1989, proposed constitutional status to PRIs and urban local bodies (ULBs), ensuring regular elections, reservations for marginalised groups and financial devolution. However, the political turbulence…

The establishment of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2009 marked a watershed moment in the country’s digital and governance landscape. At its core was Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique identification number for India’s teeming population designed to consolidate identity verification into a single, robust system, integrating biometric and demographic data. Today, Aadhaar stands as the world’s largest biometric ID system, revolutionising how government welfare reaches citizens. The initial vision for Aadhaar took shape during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government led by prime minister Manmohan Singh. The intent was clear: eliminate duplicate and fake identities making identity verification easy and cost-effective, thus enabling targeted delivery of social and welfare schemes. Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, was handpicked to lead the UIDAI. Nilekani’s leadership is widely credited with turning…

Tall, lithe and sure-footed, only 75 kg for his 6’1” frame, he covered the court like a llama might canter over an Andean slope. Prakash Padukone also straddled two parallel styles: touch artistry and power. If his deft drop shots were arguments, they would have been duplicitous: looking east, going west. But he also had a lethal half-smash that went straight as an arrow. More than everything, there was that supreme spatial-temporal court intelligence. Which shot to play, when, where. Listen to his own description of how he slowed down the hyper-kinetic Liem Swie King, disarming the Indonesian of his heavy weaponry, in the All England final of 1980: “I would make him move just a fraction of a second late because I was holding back my stroke. If he…

Bhagwan ‘Osho’ Rajneesh was the original anti-guru, a rebel who seemed to enjoy taking down many of the shibboleths that India of the 1960s and ’70s held sacred. For his western followers, he pointed out a path that for them seemed a release from the guilt and burden of living the permissive, consumerist life. Osho was one of the first sanyasis to advocate a shedding of inhibitions, melding eastern and western philosophies to create a lifestyle spirituality cult. Often dissed as the “sex guru” for his views on free love, there were also many who thought, like the late Khushwant Singh, that he was “one of India’s most original thinkers”. Indeed, he set the template for today’s high-profile spiritual entrepreneurs such as Sri Sri Ravishankar, Sadhguru and Ramdev. Rajneesh…

Mortality has struck music’s high citadel. The sixth beat of the dadra, the eighth of the keherwa, once the fingers fall there, the cycle reaches back to the first, where it began: the silence from which they were born. There’s no coming back from this sam. All the grand pillars that came in rhythmic succession—the entire range of Padma awards, the four Grammys, three of them conferred this year—stood mute and helpless. All the sounds of acclaim too will recede. Pt Kumar Gandharva, before he exited from the stage in 1992, had reminded us of Kabir’s words: Jum ke doot bade majboot, Jum se pada hai jhamela (The Messengers of Yama are strong; this entanglement is with Yama himself). This game of chess with Death was played under the grey skies…

It’s a short flight from Ahmedabad to Bhuj, but if the flight doesn’t take off for some reason as was the case for us, the road trip to India’s largest district of Kutch stretches for an entire workday—at least eight hours. If one has spare time, there is much to see along the way: the intricately carved Modhera Sun Temple, the Rani-Ki-Vav, an 11th-century stepwell that appears on our Rs 100 notes, and a fascinating roadside temple where devotees offer water bottles to a parched god. The bottles are then piled to one side in a giant heap for posterity and, apparently, plastic pollution. The highway restaurants offered delicious thepla, bun maska, dhoklas, sweet tea, and fresh orange jalebis. A few hours into the drive, trucks lugging oil, gas, and…

Until the late ’70s, India’s capital markets were anything but an exciting place. Imported into India by British capitalism, the country’s stock exchanges were run by cliques of brokers who set their own rules of trading. When they started going bust periodically, the public began to lose their trust in them. Large firms went to banks for their finance rather than raising it from the markets. Between 1949 and 1979, the average money Indian companies raised annually from capital markets was only Rs 58 crore ($71 million at 1979 exchange rates). It was around this time that Dhirubhai Ambani, an enterprising textile entrepreneur whose ambition was to make his business world class, made an entry, promising the public that they could get rich if they invested in him. In 1977,…

Hard data would be sufficient to illustrate the success of India’s software industry, but IT veterans recall an anecdote that captures the incredulity of how it all unfolded. Sometime in 1991, when IT was a fledgling export industry of about $100 million, N. Vittal, who was then secretary of the Department of Electronics, egged on the honchos assembled at a convention of the Computer Society of India in Bengaluru to strive for exports of $400 million in the following year, in return for policy tweaks. To the sceptical gathering, Vittal narrated an Akbar-Birbal tale—in an irritable mood, the emperor had ordered Birbal to be put to death but the quick-thinking poet wangled a year’s reprieve by promising to make Akbar’s horse fly. His logic was apparently this: one of three…

Legend has it that when the first under-ground metro train began running between Bhowanipore and Esplanade in Calcutta in 1984, there were more gawking onlookers than riders for it. Perhaps because it had taken such a long time coming, for the foundation stone for the Calcutta Metro had been laid some 12 years earlier, in 1972, by then prime minister Indira Gandhi. The project had found the going painstakingly slow, and few would have envisioned the impact it would have on urban transport in India. But that modest beginning planted the seeds of a metro rail revolution that would transform India over the next four decades. Around the same time, in 1984, the Urban Arts Commission in Delhi proposed a multi-modal transport system, including underground mass rapid transit corridors to…

Growing up in the 1950s, Anand Sharma (name changed), realised at a very young age that he had no choice but to pretend to be a heterosexual. “I was 14 when I knew I was attracted to men and not women but that same year I realised it was best not to speak about it. By the time I was in my early 20s, I knew I had to force myself to have sex with women if I wanted any social acceptance,” he says. Today, aged 73, the Delhi-based former investment banker says he knows he can “come out of the closet” without any legal repercussions but his life has been built on so many lies that he cannot speak his truth without hurting a great number of people. “It…

To be killed before being born. What greater violation of human right can there be? Yet female foeticide, the inhuman act of getting rid of a girl child, has survived well into the 21st century, if India’s sex ratio at birth (SRB) is anything to go by. It stood at 108.1 boys per 100 girls in 2020 when the natural SRB is 105. India last had that SRB before the 1970s. Saving the girl child has therefore been a long-standing priority in the country. The PNDT or Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994, was one of the first steps towards it. It prohibited genetic counselling centres, labs and clinics from undertaking activities related to pre-natal testing, banned the sale of ultrasound machines to such establishments unless…

Excepting its proven excellence in ballistic missiles, India has met its needs for cutting-edge military hardware either through imports or licensed manufacturing under transfer of technology deals. The emergence of INS Arihant—India’s first indigenous nuclear submarine—therefore, has to be counted as one of the country’s finest-ever achievements in cracking complex military knowhow. Designed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Arihant was launched on July 26, 2009, and commissioned on August 23, 2016. Its development highlights the country’s commitment to self-reliance in defence and signals progress in indigenous shipbuilding, nuclear propulsion and missile systems, thus reducing dependency on foreign suppliers. Most importantly, Arihant satisfactorily fulfils India’s strategic nuclear deterrent under the triad doctrine, which encompasses land, air and sea-based nuclear delivery systems. Arihant thus establishes another credible second-strike…

The “peaceful nuclear test” on May 18, 1974, broke a global status quo and made India the first country to have conducted a test outside of the UN Security Council members. That nuclear fission type bomb gave India entry into the elite nuclear club, and established a much-required deterrent capability. But the real deal for which nuclear scientists and engineers had striven hard came 24 years later, on May 11 and 13, 1998, at the same place—the Army’s Pokhran Test Range in Rajasthan. A series of five nuclear tests, Operation Shakti demonstrated India’s ability to design and develop advanced nuclear weapons (fission and thermonuclear weapons with yields of up to 200 kilotonnes) and came as the culmination of years of indigenous research in nuclear technology. Behind its success also lay…

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), a groundbreaking initiative that brought millions of underprivileged Indians into the formal banking system. Launched in August 2014, the scheme offered zero-balance savings accounts without any minimum balance requirement, free RuPay debit cards, and essential financial security features like accident insurance of Rs 2 lakh and an overdraft facility of Rs 10,000. From its inception, PMJDY has grown exponentially. The number of accounts surged from 147.2 million in March 2015 to 531.3 million today, with deposits totalling Rs 2.31 lakh crore. Beyond numbers, the initiative has created ripples across the economic landscape. Access to a bank account is more than a financial milestone; it’s an enabler of economic independence. In fact, with the proliferation of UPI…

It was in early 2000, when at a meeting convened by then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the economic advisory panel—comprising the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Bimal Jalan and his predecessors I.G. Patel and C. Rangarajan—advocated for sweeping reforms in the country’s tax structure. With India newly opened to global investments and seen as a burgeoning consumer market, the need for a simpler, unified tax system became evident. The seeds of change were sown when finance minister Yashwant Sinha, in July 2000, announced the formation of two task forces led by his advisor, economist Vijay Kelkar. Among their recommendations, the proposal for a unified Goods and Services Tax (GST) emerged as a game-changer, aiming to replace the fragmented and cumbersome tax regime. The focus was on reducing cascading…

Five five. Not a lot of inch tape above the mean sea level, but when you pack in unknowable tonnes of a substance called greatness, no scale suffices. How do you measure Sunil Gavaskar, the batsman? He left some vast amounts of tonnage out there for future statisticians to excavate and wonder at. One milestone came on a warm spring day in 1987 when, against Pakistan in Ahmedabad, he bent over low on the back foot to a nothing delivery from Ejaz Faqih for a late-cut past the wicketkeeper, and sprinted. That would become the first 10,000th Test run anyone with a willow had ever scored. The batsman’s equivalent of the first Four-Minute Mile. Or Everest. We duly pick that here, to mark the onset of a phase where Indian…

The alchemy of capitalism and art is all too familiar today—as anyone who has watched videos of crypto currency billionaire Justin Sun eating Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana knows. Sun had paid an honest $6.2 million (around Rs 50 crore) for the privilege, at a Sotheby’s auction, of course. While Indian artists have not yet achieved quite this level of succès de scandale, artworks by a number of our leading modernist painters, particularly dead ones, are routinely auctioned at prices to rival that vanishing banana. Indian contemporary art had lived in the abstract shadows of western masters for much of the 20th century, with home-grown talents like M.F. Husain and F.N. Souza locked in a sullen contest for recognition as ‘India’s Picasso’. All that changed, like much else, in the wake…

In 1978, within a year of its opening, ITC’s Welcomgroup Maurya Sheraton hotel in Delhi executed two culinary coups. It brought tandoori food from the Northwest Frontier to a five-star hotel for the first time with the launch of ‘Bukhara’, which also had India’s first show kitchen. ITC chairman Ajit Narain Haksar, a passionate foodie and champion of all things Indian, roped in Imtiaz Qureshi, originally from Lucknow, to purvey the refined fare of Awadh with the restaurant ‘Mayur’ (rebranded as ‘Dum Pukht’ in 1987). Nakul Anand, former executive director, ITC Ltd, who joined their hotels division as a management trainee in 1978 and watched these innovations closely, says, “Previously, all hotels had standard gravies into which paneer, chicken, etc. would be mixed in. We got out of that and…

Bringing a modern twist to a traditional treasure of Kashmir, Uber has just launched Uber Shikara. Via the ride-sharing app, you can now book a boat ride of up to one hour for 1-4 passengers between the different ghats on the Dal Lake. The service is offered between 10 am and 5 pm and bookings can be made 12 hours to 15 days in advance. The best part? Uber won’t be charging the shikara ‘drivers’ a booking fee; they will get 100 per cent of the ride price, thus supporting local tourism. VANDE BHARAT SLEEPER TRAIN READY TO TAKE BERTH The Indian Railways is launching the Vande Bharat long-distance sleeper trains, the first of which will soon undergo field trials. While the routes haven’t been disclosed for the feature-rich superfast…