The Arjun Munda government’s headlong drive to distribute new ration cards among 50 lakh families across the state is turning out to be an organised chaos, with acute crunch of application forms and clueless public representatives fielded for the job. While a three-day, statewide camp kicked off today to arm every family in rural and urban pockets with ration cards that entitle them to subsidised foodgrain, kerosene, et al, inadequate number...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

A survey by the West Midnapore administration has found that over two lakh voters, three fourths of them in Maoist-affected areas, are afraid of voting. District officials said the survey of nearly five lakh people to identify “vulnerable voters” had been carried out following instructions from the Election Commission. “As West Midnapore has the largest Maoist-affected area in the state, the commission had asked us to find out about the fear factor...

It is difficult to predict what denouement the spat between the Sheikh Hasina-led Bangladesh Government and Mohammed Yunus, the Noble Laureate, would ultimately reach but it has undoubtedly brought to the fore many pitfalls of the micro-credit system which has so far been hailed as a panacea for poverty alleviation not just in the Third World countries but in many developed nations too. It may be a bit unfair to...

With an eye on Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh early next year, Vilasrao Deshmukh’s Rural Development Ministry appears to have decided to pin down the Mayawati-led BSP government over the implementation of the UPA’s flagship rural job guarantee scheme (NREGS) in the state. The Rural Development Ministry has constituted a 10-member committee to look into loopholes in the implementation of the scheme in the pocket boroughs of Congress president Sonia Gandhi...