-Agence France-Presse Nekpur: With both hands holding the basket of human excrement on her head, widowed grandmother Kela walks through a stream of sewage, up a mound of waste and then dumps the filth while cursing. "Nobody even pays us a decent wage!" she spits as she rakes mud and rubbish over her newly deposited pile, one of several she drops in the course of her working day cleaning toilets as a...

-The Economic Times After Mahatma Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh is the only national leader to be genuinely concerned that 65 years after Independence, some 600 million Indians in the 21st century continue to use open skies as their latrines. While Lee Kuan Yew continues to exhort Singaporeans to have cleaner loos, our ministry of railways thinks depositing human excreta all along the country's length and breadth, including deep into the cities -...

-Outlook In his maiden visit to Naxal-hit Chhattisgarh, President Pranab Mukherjee today praised the "young state" for its all-round development. Asserting that Chhattisgarh has a rich legacy of one of the oldest panchayati raj systems, he said it has emerged as one of the fastest developing states in the country. "This young state has registered all round development on many fronts and made its presence felt at the national level," he said in...

-NDTV Hyderabad: The rains triggered by Cyclone Nilam which crossed the Andhra Pradesh coast near Chennai on October 31 have battered the state, claiming 29 lives. Normal life has been thrown out of gear in the region and hundreds of villages remained inundated. In East and West Godavari districts, famous as the rice bowl of the state, standing paddy and cotton crops over lakhs of acres were damaged. Officials said they were making...

-The Business Standard Three former Karnataka CMs face Lok Ayukta probe  The investigation ordered by the Lok Ayukta court in Karnataka into the Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise (NICE) project, which has the mandate to build the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC), consisting of an expressway and five townships, is significant for two reasons. One, despite being headless for some time, the Karnataka Lok Ayukta is not a toothless organisation; it played a key...