Today, GlobalXplorer, the citizen science platform created by satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak with the 2016 TED Prize — which allows users live out their Indiana Jones fantasies and search for archaeological sites from home — announced the location of its second expedition. The location will be: India! GlobalXplorer’s first expedition took users to Peru, where they […]
Today we confirmed some exciting news about TED’s most ambitious television project yet: a major network series in India hosted by megawatt Bollywood film star Shah Rukh Khan. The program will air on Star India, one of India’s largest media conglomerates and our partner in production. TED Talks India: Nayi Soch, which translates to “new thinking,” marks […]
You’ve probably heard of Area 51. But how about Area Zero? Area Zero is the flagship center of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud, the idea that won him the 2013 TED Prize. It’s the final of Mitra’s labs dedicated to self-organized learning, and it opened this morning in Gocharan in West Bengal, India. A […]
Bhilwara is a city in Rajasthan, India, famous for its textile industry. Textiles dominate the local economy; after agriculture, it’s the leading employer in the city. The city is populated with spinning looms, fabric processing plants and weaving centers, producing huge swaths of yarn and thousands of tons of suiting fabric. But seeing Bhilwara merely […]
TEDx organizer Seema Raman has held three events in the past year, and traveled from her home in Bangalore to the snowy mountains of British Columbia to learn more about putting on great events. But the funny thing is: Raman never intended to organize anything at all. Raman, a 20-year-old engineering student at PES Institute […]
A forest planted by humans, then left to nature’s own devices, typically takes at least 100 years to mature. But what if we could make the process happen ten times faster? With his company Afforestt, eco-entrepreneur Shubhendu Sharma is creating mini-forest ecosystems using an accelerated method. It’s based on the practices of Japanese forester Akira Miyawaki, […]
“Early one morning last February, a man turned up on my doorstep who had travelled through the night to get there,” said Sugata Mitra, the education reformer who received the 2013 TED Prize. “This schoolteacher wanted to do something positive for his village, which had no electricity, health care or primary education … It was […]
In a major setback last week for the LGBT community, an Indian Supreme Court ruling upheld Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — a 153-year-old law criminalizing gay sex. This act overturned a 2009 Delhi High Court ruling that this should not apply to consensual acts and, essentially, recriminalized homosexuality. While the Indian government […]
When Jane Chen and her team arrived in India five years ago, it was with a bold idea. They wanted to develop a simple, affordable solution to a terrible problem: infant mortality. They went to the right place. According to a recent Child Mortality report, produced by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, […]
Artist Sharmistha Ray has spent her life moving between India, the Middle East and the United States, discovering, layer by layer, her own sense of self, sexual identity and artistic vision in contrast or harmony with each new environment. Now, as her latest exhibition Reflections + Transformations is set to open at the Aicon Gallery in […]
In the most recent issue of Scientific American, Pawan Sinha shares the eye-opening experience that shook his worldview. When riding through the streets of New Delhi one night in 2002, Sinha’s cab slowed for a red light by a struggling family sitting on the side of the road. Both of the children, emaciated and barefoot, […]
As protests roll through India, calling for punishment of six men who brutally gang raped a 23-year-old woman on a public bus in December with fatal results, TED Fellow Shalini Kantayya has written a powerful op-ed for The New York Times detailing her own sexual assault in India. Kantayya shares that event was traumatizing — […]
[ted id=1614 width=560 height=315] Arunachalam Muruganantham may not seem like the most obvious person to have started a revolution in sanitary napkins — after all, he is male. But in this funny and uplifting talk, given at the TED Talent Search in Bangalore, Muruganantham describes how he is enabling women in India to make their […]