Twenty-two year old Manjula reached the radio station before daybreak one day in August last year and started broadcasting Tsunami alerts at 5:00 a.m. Early morning listeners were caught unaware as they are used to the community radio station, Kalanjiam Vaanoli, beginning its broadcast only at eight. By mid-morning, Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu and the surrounding region were given the all-clear by the district administration, but Manjula had already done her job effectively and efficiently that day.

In response to security concerns in the neighborhood and as it emerges as a regional superpower, India has embarked on a grand scheme of defense modernization. A recent study published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) places India as the largest importer of arms between 2006 and 2010 and estimates the modernization of the industry at $80 billion.

The pleasure of speaking multiple tongues is that you will occasionally come across a word that would otherwise be lost in translation. Every language has these hidden expressions, which give away something unique or quirky about a culture. And like German’s schadenfreude, or the Yiddish kvetch, India has a particularly interesting one of its own: jugaad. A crude translation might be “making do,” but then that wouldn’t really do justice to all the shades of meaning, spanning the nefarious to the ingenious.

India has one-sixth of the world’s population but accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s energy consumption. India’s energy sector is plagued with energy and peak power shortages. At the present time, a large percentage of the population – official estimates indicate about 50 percent – do not have access to electricity. The development goal of providing access to convenient energy sources – electricity, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking – would need a significant increase in the energy services supplied.

Nandigram. Singur. Posco. Yamuna Expressway. Jaitapur. Maha Mumbai. Anyone who follows the news in India knows these names as sites and projects where land acquisition efforts have run into serious trouble. But who has heard of Hukkeri in Karnataka, Nanded in Maharashtra, Lower Penganga Valley in Andhra Pradesh, or Mahuva in Gujarat?

As the largest democracy in Asia, and indeed in the world, India has a keen tradition of public protest. In fact, it is hard to travel from one end of an Indian city to the other without coming across a political or social demonstration of some kind, whether it is made up of lawyers, trade unionists, or party campaigners.

The rapid economic ascendance of India as a global power is, without a doubt, a historic development that will reshape the balance of power in the world in the coming decades. Because of its democratic political system and private-sector entrepreneurial dynamism, India’s rise is warmly welcomed in the West.

The history of modern science in India has too often been written about as a nationalist tale; sometimes heroic, sometimes not, with the scientist working with and within the massive energies released by the moment of India’s independence in 1947.

Since India and Pakistan claimed formal nuclear status in 1998, a debate has revived among nuclear optimists and pessimists on the consequences of nuclear proliferation. The original Sagan-Waltz debate has been followed up by Ganguly on the one hand, who optimistically argues that South Asia is stable, and Kapur on the other, who pessimistically maintains that there remain serious grounds for instability.

Since the 1980s, the world’s governments have decreased state welfare rhetoric and policy, and the proportion of unprotected “informal” workers has expanded. The result has been an increase in the proportion of the world’s workers who do not receive secure wages or social benefits from employers or the state.