On June 13, 2011, the day after Baba Ramdev broke his 9 days fast under media arc lights, another sage, admitted in the same Himalayan hospital in Dehradun, Swami Nigamananda passed away. He was on a fast since February 19th, to save river Ganga from illegal sand mining and stone-crushing in Uttarakhand. Ironically, the court judgment on the cause for which he had been fighting came too late, when he had already slipped into a coma. His worst nightmares came true in the form of flash floods, exactly 2 years after his death. Continue reading
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Life is difficult for pedestrians in Indian cities. It is estimated that around 1.5 lakh people die on the streets of Indian cities every year, and over a crore get hospitalized. In the run for making our roads comparable to that of the developed parts of the world, we have focused too much on the car and bike wallas, and done too little for the pedestrians. 
The Chotanagpur region is the adivasi dominated plateau in eastern India, which covers much of Jharkhand as well as adjacent parts of Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. Almost one hundred years before India’s First War of Independence (1857), the adivasi tribals of the Chotanagpur plateau region had declared war against the British colonial rule in the area. The first ever revolt in India, against the exploitative landlords and the British government happened in this region. 
