Tag Archives | orissa

House of Dignity: Mighty Madiath’s Life Mission

By on March 25, 2013 in Rural, Watsan

Gram Vikas (GV) is my favorite Orissa organization. Heck, if I ever curated a Top 5 pan-India list, it would probably be in it. When I asked Bangalore’s rainwater harvesting guru for his Top 10 list of Indian NGOs, Gram Vikas inevitably made it there. I don’t wax eloquent about too many non-social enterprise organizations on this blog […]

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The Last 500 Feet

By on January 12, 2013 in Agri, Rural Mkts

[Editor's Note: Paul Polak, social entrepreneur and author of Out of Poverty, wrote this highly informative narrative of the problems (and some proposed solutions) in the rural transportation area (what he terms as the 'last 500 feet') with stories from Orissa to Uganda to Bangladesh to Nepal to Somalia to Zambia and back to (Eastern) […]

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Returning to the Migration Meme

By on March 9, 2012 in Migration

In the past week, three conversations with three different migrants in Bangalore (all working as security guards) reminded me why I need to devote more time (and blog space) to the migration meme. Conversation #1: RMM works for Handiman Services as a security guard supervisor in Koramangala. RMM is 50 years old, hails from Jajpur […]

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Health Insights from Banerjee Duflo’s Poor Economics

By on August 3, 2011 in Healthcare, Poverty Econ

This is Part 3 of our series of insights from Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics – culled from Chapter 3 (Low-Hanging Fruit for Better (Global) Health?) Part 2 in this series was For the poor, what could possibly be more important than food? Countries in which a large fraction of the population is […]

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The Twentyfirst Century Kabuliwalas of India

By on April 19, 2011 in General

Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali poet, novelist, playwright, painter and musician) is renowned for so many works of art that it seems almost criminal to dwell on a personal favorite. Yet I must. Tagore’s Kabuliwala is a poignant tale set in Calcutta about a poor Pathan from Afghanistan (Abdur Rehman Khan) who lives with his old mother […]

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