Verghese Kurien, who passed away recently, will be best known for building Amul into one of India's most valuable brands which is an organisation of nearly three million smallholder dairy producers and a Rs 12,000 crore farmer-owned business. He will also be remembered for creating the National Dairy Development Board which replicated Amul's complex institutional modelacross India.

Kolkata-based architect Laurent Fournier tells how ceilings can float and why bamboo-reed-mud make more sense than brick-concrete-steel.

Mrinal Gore, veteran politician and leader of the women's movement in Maharashtra, who passed away recently was the quintessential grass-roots leader who could also hold her own in the state legislature. A call from her would mobilise thousands of women on the streets of Mumbai and she tirelessly raised issues that affected the common citizen, from rising prices, shortage of water, sex determination tests to corruption in real estate. Mumbai's citizens, otherwise ever cynical about politicians, held her in great esteem and affectionately called her paaniwali bai - the water lady.

Urban campaigner and architect Arif Hasan has been central to a sanitary revolution, transforming Orangi, Karachi, from informal settlement to thriving community. Using his technical know-how, residents built a sewage system, sparking vast social change. Now chair of Pakistan's urbanization task force, he discusses incorporating sustainable design into poor cities.

If architecture is 'design for living', one of its greatest challenges is how to live with the masses of waste we excrete. Four pioneers in green sanitation design outline solutions to a dilemma too often shunted down the pan.

Gangadharan Menon travels to Kheechan to meet Ratanlal Maloo - the man who has single-handedly called over 15,000 Damoiselle Cranes to his little hamlet in Rajasthan from their homes in Mongolia and Eurasia, as annual guests, and created a sanctuary worth visiting. The love and care he showed the birds ensured that their numbers increased year after year as word spread in their hometown!

In the summer of 2011, Seth Berkley moved from New York to Geneva as the new chief executive of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). For over a decade previously, Berkley had run the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), an institution he had founded. This experience confirmed his status as one of the world’s frontline soldiers in the battle against disease. A polymath and explorer in his spare time, Berkley is a public health specialist of some renown.

Joe Bast and his libertarian think tank are a major force among climate sceptics — but they just can't win the battle over science.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110727/full/475440a.html

A demagogue is able to make New Delhi panic and shoot itself in the foot. (Editorial)

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh isn't bothered how industry looks at him. He's here to enforce green laws.