Reports

The drop in the value of the rupee has not been auguring well for Indians. During 2013, travellers from India paid more for their hotel rooms as the drop in value of the rupee made traveling abroad more expensive. In fact, Indian travellers paid more for hotel rooms in three out of every four destinations abroad, according to latest Hotels.com Hotel Price Index (HPI). On the other hand, global travellers on an average paid 2 per cent more on hotels in India in 2013 as compared to 2012 (a...

This comes as a spanner in the works of those working night and day to evolve policies and mechanisms to arrest climate change. The implementation of climate engineering technologies as a last ditch effort to combat the escalating effects of climate change could, in fact, make things worse, assert a team of researchers. This comes as a spanner in the works of those working night and day to evolve policies and mechanisms to arrest climate change. The implementation of climate engineering...

Raja Sonu’s eyes well up when he recollects the trying days and inhuman conditions under which his father would grovel in a dark, dingy room, trying to handcraft pieces of jewellery. His old man couldn’t see the son grow up – and try his own hands at jewellery; he succumbed to the working conditions. Such were the conditions under which artisans worked at jewellery workshops in Kolkata that Raja’s mother never wanted him to follow in his father’s footsteps. But he did, and ended up in far-away...

The organisation of political power within and between nations and citizens if failing miserably to protect the public's health. Not that you didn't suspect it. But this time there is corroboration, and it comes in the form of findings of a new Commission from The Lancet and the University of Oslo. These power asymmetries, together with the piecemeal way that global decisionmaking has developed since World War II, are having a disastrous effect on human health, say the report's authors. The fact...

The rash of rapes and cases of molesations in the country continue to paint India as among the worst countries for women to live in, but research finds it otherwise. The incidence of sexual violence in India and Bangladesh are among the lowest in the world. It is, not surprisingly, the bloodiest in central sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide, one in 14 women (7.2 per cent) aged 15 years or older report being sexually assaulted by someone other than an intimate partner at least once in their lives...

The world has been turned upside down since the advent of the Internet. If there is something that apparently hasn't changed overwhelmingly in these two decades of upheaval, to quite an extent, it has been the browser. Yet, there is one that intends being a game-changer, and has been at it quite silently for the last four months. This browser is called Coast by Opera; one that is nothing like the conventional Internet browsers that people use across devices — it takes a quantum leap from what...

Most were bitten by the bug of the moment, happily so. And those not bitten ended up being the most bugged of them all. Yeah, one's talking about the "My Facebook Movie" that has been a raging craze for the last two days. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Facebook has been inviting users to make "My Facebook Movie" by visiting a special website while being logged in. A short video, featuring a collection of most-liked photos, posts and life events, would be automatically produced and posted on...

When Titan opened its first store at Safina Plaza on Infantry Road in 1988, retail as we know it was in its infancy. And so was the business of watches. Twenty-five years later, the retail landscape has changed. As have the very format of retail outlets, evident when the company launched its 1000th store on 100 ft road in the upmarket Indiranagar area on Monday — a swank big-format store spread over two floors. Harking back to the times when there was nothing glitzy about watch stores, Bhaskar...

Nokia on Monday released its first 6-inch Lumia smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 1520, into the Indian market. The Nokia Lumia 1520 comes with a 1080p Full HD screen, a 20MP PureView camera with optical image stabilisation, oversampling technology and zooming capabilities, enabling people to easily capture and edit high quality pictures and tell better stories. The company, which lost considerable ground and quite fast at that after the advent of Android smarphones, claims that the newest phone in...

Scams revolving around mini-hydel projects (MHPs) in the Western Ghats region of Karnakata get weirder by the day. And there's nothing sublime about any of the preposterous projects; each dam scam in fact is more ridiculous than the previous one. The latest one that's come to light is a two-in-one project. This one is a single project masquerading as two different hydel projects on paper. The 24MW Perla Mini Hydel Project and the 24 MW Shamburi Mini Hydel Project on the Netravathi river have the...