In yet another step towards modernising India's postal services, Union Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday launched ‘e-post office,' the e-commerce portal of India Post that will provide various postal services online. ‘Transact anytime' “Earlier, consumers used to go to service providers but now services providers are going to consumers… this is the future of the 21st century. The portal will enable customers to transact postal business anytime and...

More than a hundred officials from various government and non government agencies observed a minute’s silence to pay tribute to slain Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGREGS) activist Niyamat Ansari at a consultation session organised by Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) to discuss the challenges facing the scheme and its future today. Deputy chief minister Hemant Soren, who was the chief guest on the occasion, faced a barrage of...

Young women are part of a campaign to bring much-needed social change and improve sanitation facilities If you don't have a toilet at home, you might not get a bride in India. In a silent revolution of sorts, Indian women across the country, especially in rural and semi-urban areas, have a single condition before they agree to a match – the groom must have a toilet in his home. The "No Toilet,...

The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold Concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches. But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from...

The government has taken the first Concrete step to start disbursing subsidies for things like kerosene, cooking gas and fertilisers to individuals, families and farmers by direct cash transfer. A task force under the leadership of Nandan Nilekani, who heads the Unique Identification Authority of India, has been given the target of getting a pilot going by the end of the year. The transfer system will piggyback on the solution...