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This article examines the suburban and economic development of rural Goa, located on the western coast of India. The picturesque, laid-back charm of Goa has ignited a real estate frenzy, with prices in the area escalating and opposition to all the development mounting. A history of Goa is briefly discussed. Of particular focus is the story of Roy Patrao, who is searching for property in Goa upon which to build, and architect Dean D'Cruz who has witnessed Goa's transformation.

The article reports on the impact of extreme summer heat on the health of people in India in 2018. Many people have died and got sick because of the extreme heat, especially the poor people. They suffered heatstroke, fatigue and nausea. The livelihoods of tens of millions people have also been affected by the extreme heat.

The article reports on the emerging issues addressed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his speech delivered at the Madison Square Garden in New York City. Among the major issues that were mentioned include terrorism, democracy, and trade policy and taxes. It mentions that Modi also had a formal meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama to strengthen the diplomatic relations of two countries.

The article focuses on the inadequate state of public elementary and secondary education in India. The country has financed a well-regarded university system, but lower public schools are underfunded, perform poorly on tests, and serve the nation's huge population of the poor. Indians who can afford to send their children to private schools do so. The strong growth of India's economy has created a need for literate workers, making the poor schools an economic and social threat.

The article focuses on a growing social trend in India. Thanks to the country's increased prosperity, many persons are purchasing automobiles without knowing how to drive. Traffic in major cities is chaotic, with roads full of obstacles ranging from other automobiles to farm animals. A driving instructor in New Delhi, who said he was teaching a dozen pupils each day, said the traffic caused him to commute to work by motorcycle rather than an automobile.

The article profiles Iranian writer and philosopher, Ramin Jahanbegloo, who has been living in India on and off for two years. He was imprisoned in Iran for four months before being released on bail for charges that he collaborated with the U.S. to destabilize the state of Iran. Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran, Iran and was introduced to India when India's ambassador to Iran was a frequent guest at his home. Details are given for his book "India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India."

The author reports that new freedoms for women are emerging in India as a surging economy has created jobs and prompted young professionals to leave home and live independently. The changes are most noticeable among middle-class, college-educated women. The lifestyles of women in Bangalore, India are discussed.

The article reports that India has increased their military budget as their economy has grown. The country's decision coincides with growing diplomatic relations between the U.S. and India. Companies, such as airplane manufacturer Lockheed Martin, feel that India's market could give their companies a new growth area. In August 2007, India's department of defense invited bids for a contract for 126 new fighter jets estimated to cost $10.2 billion.

The article reports on research being conducted by geologists in the Himalayan Mountains studying the retreat of glaciers across the area. As glaciers in the Himalayas melt, they supply the majority of water to South Asia's rivers. Despite this, the glaciers in India are the least studied group of glaciers in the world.

The article examines how India's growing construction industry is affecting the country's poorest people. According to the Planning Commission of India, construction and its ancillary trades employ around 30 million people in the country.The article reports that the increased focus being put on the construction industry comes as more migrant workers can't support themselves on farming.

The article discusses the problems with the power grid in India. The country has over one billion people and is building at a frenzied rate. However, it has not developed its electric generators and other utilities to keep up with the country's real estate development. Many malls and high tech companies rely on their own diesel generators to deal with power outages. Emissions standards are not being met.

The article reports that the arrest of an art student at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, India has resulted in protests from various artists across the country. Lawyer Niraj Jain did not like several works of art exhibited on a wall in the art department library. Jain persuaded the police to arrest a student who had created the works of art. Protestors gathered on May 14, 2007 to condemn his arrest.

The article discusses food sold by street vendors in India. The food sold on streets in New Delhi is known as "chaat," taken from the verb that means "to lick." The snacks encompass a variety of textures and flavors, but are generally fried and based on starches. As India modernizes, many traditional street foods have moved indoors and are now produced in more sanitary conditions.

The article discusses an area of India around Ghoramara Island which is threatened by rising sea levels. Half the village on the delta island has fallen into the river. The rising rivers from the Himalayas, natural disasters, human-induced climate change, and a mounting sea level all contribute to the delta's disappearing. A study by Sugata Hazra, an oceanographer at Jadavpur University in nearby Calcutta, says nearly 31 square miles in the area have disappeared over three decades.

The article discusses how new private airlines in India are providing job opportunities as flight attendants for residents of the country. The experience of Abhinanda Shukla of training at the Frankfinn Institute of Air Hostess Training is described. Training schools have increased in India in response to a lack of skilled workers.

This article focuses on results of a study commissioned by the National Association of Software and Service Companies that found that only one in four engineering graduates in India were employable. Most were deficient in technical skills, English fluency, oral presentation skills or teamwork ability. The skills gap reflects the limited availability of high-quality college education. The university systems of India are having trouble keeping up with the demand for technology services.

The author focuses on the social and economic impact of monsoons in India. Details related to the recent flooding in Surat, India are reviewed. The author reviews how parts of the country are crippled by annual floods while other regions remained parched by drought. Statistics related to the country's annual rainfall are reviewed. The author discusses how India can better harness it's rainfall for use in its development. INSET: The Debate: Water Management, Water Fees and Conservation.

The article focuses on the widespread water shortages in India. According to the author people in New Delhi, the country's richest city, spend most of their day foraging for water. It is the author's view that their predicament testifies to the government's inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at a time when India is asserting itself as a global power. Comments from Sunita Narain, director of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi, are reviewed.

The article focuses on Indian author Khushwant Singh. Singh's 1956 work "Train to Pakistan" is discussed. Details related to a forthcoming new edition of the book are reviewed. According to the author, the new edition features 66 unflinching black-and-white photographs of the Partition era in India.

The article focuses on the issue of suicide among farmers in India. According to the author, some 17,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2003. The author states that the issue is becoming an increasingly bigger political challenge for Prime Minister Manmoh Singh, particularly impacting India's relationship with the United States. The author reviews how changes brought be economic reforms have opened Indian farmers to global competition.

This article reports on July 11, 2006 bomb explosions on a commuter train in Mumbai, India. Nearly two hundred people were killed in the explosions, and more than six hundred were injured, as the bombs struck at least seven trains along the city's western railroad line. A comparison is drawn to the March 2004 train bombings in London, England.

The article reports that a court in New Delhi, India has acquitted all nine defendants in the murder case of fashion model Jessica Lall. The author reviews how Lall was shot dead in a bar. According to the author, the prime suspect in the case was the son of an influential politician. According to the author, India's urban middle class has responded to the acquittal with outrage. Comments regarding the case from an editorial published in "The Hindustan Times" are reviewed.

The article reports that U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India announced a nuclear pact that would help India satisfy its enormous civilian energy needs while allowing it to continue to develop nuclear weapons. Details of the agreement are reviewed. Criticisms of the plan by various U.S. legislators are discussed. According to the author, India has agreed to permanently classify 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors as civilian facilities.

The article profiles Indian author Vikram Seth, author of "Two Lives." Seth's books, including "A Suitable Boy" and "Golden Gate," focus on domestic life. "Two Lives," a memoir of sorts, focuses on the lives of Seth's great uncle, Shanti Seth, and his German-Jewish wife Henny, before and after World War II. What he finds through letters and interviews and eventually a will is painfully revelatory. Seth has a house of his own, but prefers to live in his parent's house in Delhi.

This article discusses Indian artist, Tyeb Mehta, who at 80 years-old is breaking auction records. Mehta lives in Mumbai, a metropolitan area of India. His painting "Mahisasura" became the first work by an Indian painter to fetch over one million dollars at auction. There has been a surge of interest in the market for Indian art. While he enjoys the recognition, he feels finds the surge in art prices "meaningless."

The article reports on the controversy surrounding the construction of India's third-largest steel mill. The author reviews how the project has been delayed by armies of resistance made up indigenous people who live the land where the mill is supposed to be built. Comments from Chakradhar Haibru, the alleged leader of the indigenous group, are included. It is the author's view that the controversy represents the challenge of balancing industrial growth against the demands of marginalized citizens.

The article reports on two apparently coordinated explosion that tore through two crowded markets and a public bus in the Indian capital of New Delhi, killing dozens. The death toll stood at 48 and was expected to rise. The police said that 155 people had been wounded. The blasts occurred on the weekend before Diawali, the biggest Hindu festival observed in north India, and before Id al-Fitr, the festival that closes the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh issued a statement saying that the government is determined to defeat terrorists. India's neighbor and rival, Pakistan, condemned the bombings.

Discusses a low-budget drama called "My Brother Nikhil," which opened in movie theaters across India. Focus of the film on a gay man's struggle with his family and country after contracting HIV; Impact of the film on Indian cinema audiences; How the film is part of a new breed of so-called Bollywood pictures which appeals to an urban middle-class audience; Comments of its director, who goes by one name, Onir; Efforts of Onir to portray a gay relationship to ordinary Indians; How the film comes at a time when rights activists are pressing for the overturn of India's constitutional ban on homosexuality; Highlights of the film.

NEW DELHI -- The third India Art Summit, an art fair that ended last week, took up more than 90,000 square feet of Pragati Maidan, the main public exhibition hall here in India's capital. Eighty-four galleries were represented, showing the work of 500 mostly Indian modern and contemporary artists. Organizers reported 128,000 visitors over the fair's three-day run, and millions of dollars changed hands, with a couple of buyers each taking home more than $2 million in art. The Armory Show it was not. The quality of works varied much more widely than at that premier New York art fair, and there was a lot less money involved. But it was also a far cry from the first version in 2008, when only 34 galleries and 10,000 visitors showed up, and Neha Kirpal, the event's 27-year-old founder, didn't manage to break even. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IT began with parakeets, the brash, busybody rose-ringed parakeets of Delhi, with their lipstick red beaks and their irrepressible chatter, gossiping in the crevices of 15th-century tombs. Then one morning while I drank coffee, a shimmering blue-black sunbird came to drink nectar in my garden. At twilight one day, I looked up to see a hornbill perched on a neighbor's tree. An interview with the prime minister of India was repeatedly interrupted by the calls of a cantankerous peacock in his garden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SRINAGAR, Kashmir -- Since Sunday, when the government announced a round-the-clock curfew, everyone -- men, women, teenagers, toddlers -- has been locked in. There is no telling when the curfew will be lifted, and there is no leaving. On Tuesday the government announced that for the next three days at least, all flights going in and out of Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, were suspended, for the first time in more than a decade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The girls punched hard. From across India they came to this big, steamy government-run gym. Before entering the boxing ring, they bowed their heads to the floor, as though entering a temple. A sweet-shop owner's daughter let loose a right hook. A construction worker's daughter leaned against the rope, streams of sweat dripping from her face. Bouncing, ducking, like a grasshopper on speed, was a short girl from Calcutta with close-set eyes; she had forsaken her sister's wedding for a chance to come here and fight. The thud of glove against glove echoed against the cavernous walls. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It was a meeting that lasted less than an hour, with a tense, photo-op grip-and-grin on the sidelines of a summit meeting in Russia. But as the first meeting between India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year, the brief encounter was freighted with expectations of a fresh opening between the countries. Mr. Zardari flashed his customary broad grin for the cameras, but Mr. Singh had only his usual tight smile and terse words to offer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a hall adorned with paintings of battle, an understated economist named Manmohan Singh was sworn in Friday evening as prime minister of India for a second five-year term. His own battle promises to be twofold: how to restore high rates of economic growth at a time of a worldwide downturn and to push for effective government services that reach India's legions of the poor. Mr. Singh's party, the Indian National Congress, scored a surprisingly decisive victory in the election that concluded last week, defying worries of a fractured coalition government and offering hopes for a stable administration at a time when India faces daunting challenges at home and abroad. Congress alone won 206 of 543 seats in Parliament, and, with its coalition partners, stitched together a comfortable majority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eleven years ago, when she took over as president of India's oldest political party, Sonia Gandhi was seen as India's most improbable politician: a foreigner with a shaky command of Hindi, reclusive to the point of seeming aloof, a wife who had fought to keep her husband from joining politics and who lost him to an assassination. Today, Mrs. Gandhi, 62, is credited with having scored a stunning political coup. Her Indian National Congress party made its best performance in 25 years in the parliamentary elections completed last week, picking up 205 of 543 seats on its own, and with its coalition partners coming only 12 seats shy of an outright majority. All it needs to do now to form a government is stitch up alliances with a handful of independents and small parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The governing coalition led by the Indian National Congress sailed to a surprisingly decisive victory in India's grueling parliamentary elections, vaulting Manmohan Singh, a soft-spoken economic reformer, to a second term as prime minister, and sweeping away the prospect of political instability in the world's most populous democracy. Mr. Singh, 77, called the victory ''a massive mandate'' on Saturday afternoon, hours after the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party conceded defeat. The victory, in what is apparently a Congress landslide, signals the possibility of a stable and strong government in the face of stiff challenges: a sharp slowdown in economic growth, abiding poverty and instability in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

India's long, blistering election season drew to a close Wednesday, as voters went to the polls for the fifth time in as many weeks to choose their next national government. With no single party expected to get a simple majority of seats in the 543-member Parliament, the shape and substance of the next administration will depend entirely on who locks arms with whom. Multiple partners are required to rule India today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ON a rainy day in the late 17th century, an enterprising agent of the British East India Company named Job Charnock sailed along the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges that flows from high in the Himalayas into the Bay of Bengal, and pitched a tent on its swampy banks. The company bought three riverside villages. Soon they would become a port -- flowing with opium, muslin and jute -- and then, as the capital of British India until 1912, draw conquerors, dreamers and hungry folk from all over the world. Calcutta, India's first modern city, was born. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Promising land to the landless, the Communists won Abdul Bakir Shah's heart decades ago. Under an ambitious land reform drive, Mr. Shah, a sharecropper all his life, got title to nearly one fertile acre. His village and others like it have voted Communist since, keeping the party in power for an uninterrupted 32 years here in West Bengal State. But things went topsy-turvy two years ago. As Bengal belatedly joined India's slow but inexorable march to capitalism, the Communist-run state government sought to scoop up this entire cluster of mud-and-thatch hamlets to make way for the construction of a multinational chemical industrial complex. The Communists, under whose leadership factory after factory had been shuttered across this state, said it was time to bring private industry and jobs back to Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Narendra Modi, India's most incendiary politician, is trying to cast himself as the vanguard of India's modern industrial future. The ghosts of this city's savage past, though, are refusing to leave his side. Mr. Modi, 59, is the thrice-elected chief minister of the western state of Gujarat. On his watch, this city witnessed one of the worst episodes of Hindu-Muslim violence in the history of independent India: in the spring of 2002, mostly over three days, 1,180 people were killed across the state. Most were Muslims. Mr. Modi's administration was accused of doing little to stop the fury and on occasion, abetting it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

-- India began voting Thursday in one of its messiest elections in recent years, with no reliable forecast of who would prevail in campaigns that stressed hyper-local issues rather than the overall direction of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Skinny, weathered peasants gathered berries falling from a butter tree as Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent to the governing Indian National Congress, drove across these baked plains, part of a hectic campaign tour to pitch his party as champions of the poor. At every campaign stop, Mr. Gandhi, 38, fourth-generation scion of the country's premier political dynasty, rattles off antipoverty programs begun by the Congress-led coalition government: a law that promises 100 days of employment to the poor, greater financing for schools, major debt forgiveness for farmers. More largess is forthcoming, he says, if voters return Congress to power in national elections that start on Thursday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Having written off politics as a crass and irrelevant ritual for at least a generation, India's urban elite is beginning to reconsider its role. Meera Hiranandani Sanyal, a banker, said the death of a colleague in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November prompted her to take a quixotic plunge into politics. Shocked by the government's failure to halt the siege for three days, Ms. Sanyal decided to run for a seat in India's 543-member Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A senior American envoy sought Wednesday to forge common cause among India, Pakistan and the United States -- three countries with a long legacy of ambivalence and animosity among them -- saying that their national security interests were endangered by the intensifying threat of the Taliban and other extremist groups. ''For the first time since partition, India, Pakistan and the United States face a common threat, a common challenge, a common task,'' Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States special representative for the region, told reporters here on Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]