In an effort to help prevent dangerous contamination of food with melamine, a toxic chemical, the United Nations food standards body today set new limits for the amount of the substance that can be present in baby formula, other foods and animal feed without causing health problems. The maximum melamine allowed in baby formula was set at one milligram (mg) per kilogramme (kg) and 2.5 mg/kg in other foods and...

The UN has said what the Congress had been bragging all the time. The international agency has hailed India’s rural job guarantee scheme, one of the flagship programmes of the UPA government, saying that it has reduced poverty and reversed inequality. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) in a report titled “What Will it Take to Achieve Millennium Development Goals? An International Assessment,” says the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has...

Jat Mahasabha wants marriageable age of girls and boys to be lowered to 15 and 17 respectively so that couples don't elope and marry against the wishes of their families. According to Om Prakash Mann, Haryana president of All India Jat Mahasabha, the demand will be discussed at a sarv khap panchayat on July 17 at Meham Chaubisi Chabutara in Rohtak. The demand was raised at a meeting of khap...

This National Advisory Council might not be as powerful as its namesake and as freewheeling in its mandate, but it will oversee the implementation of the Right to Education, the single most important intervention in the field of education since independence. HRD minister Kapil Sibal, who will be the ex-officio chairperson of this 14-member NAC, has cleared the names of eight members. They are Kiran Karnik, former president of NASSCOM;...

While India’s new Right to Education Act seeks to bring free and compulsory education for all children, it seems to short-change them through an unrealistic vision of the private sector’s involvement. In August 2009, the Right to Education Act was passed in the Indian Parliament with no debate, by the fewer than 60 members who happened to be attending the session that day. Not that the Act was an open-and-shut...