The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has recommended a Rs 4,250 crore programme to provide shelters and other amenities to homeless in Class 1 cities in the country. The council has suggested the National Programme for Shelters and Other Services for Urban Homeless to set up 6,800 permanent shelters for around 3 lakh homeless - 15% of the estimated population of people living in the open across urban India. The council, moving...

-PTI A UP revenue board member and five others were today booked by the CBI in three new cases for allegedly fudging funds in NRHM projects estimated to be over Rs 250 crore as the agency carried out searches at 44 locations across the state and the national capital. Residential premises of revenue board member Pradeep Shukla and officials of public sector undertakings were searched during the operation which was spread across...

It would be grave folly to recoil from the N-option, our safest Nuclear Is Clear     The world needs cheap energy and, as of now, nuclear plants are the most efficient means to that end     Switching to fossil fuel sources will add to global warming. In extremis, the oceans could boil away.     The lesson from Fukushima is no worse than that tsunamis are a danger to everything in their path *** After the...

States turn to dubious technology for saving girl child With the country’s child sex ratio hitting an all-time low—944 girls for every 1,000 boys—states are turning to a monitoring device to fix the imbalance. Public health activists say the device, called Silent Observer, is more hogwash than an answer. Silent Observer can be fitted into sonography machines to allow the authorities to monitor and record pre-natal ultrasound scans taken by doctors. It...

The use of tracker technology to zero in on the misuse of diagnostic techniques for sex determination has evoked mixed reactions. ONE of the least discussed issues in the context of the data thrown up by Census 2011 is the worrisome decline in the child sex ratio (CSR) and the not-too-perfect implementation of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, or PCPNDT Act. There is reason to...