-Live Mint   As United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi prepares to intervene next week in the great national debate about who is poor, she might want to visit north-eastern Mumbai to see how the poorest are not even classified as such and how a giant government scheme to save their children from malnutrition is failing. The nauseating stench from a mountain of garbage greets a visitor to Rafi Nagar at the base...

The Centre proposes to merge the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and the yet-to-be-launched National Urban Health Mission (NUHM) in the 13th Five-Year-Plan period. The two ambitious Missions will be separate entities in the upcoming 12th Five-Year-Plan period, after the launch of the urban health mission, but subsequently merged. In its proposals to the Planning Commission, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has said that the National Urban Health Mission...

The media imagery of a “liberated” Red corridor extending from Andhra Pradesh, cutting across the heart of India, all the way to Nepal is the most vivid representation of the threat that Maoists pose to our country. The Prime Minister describes the Maoists as India's most serious internal security challenge and the Home Minister rates it as a “problem graver than terrorism.” In search of an effective response, official committees have,...

It would have meant endless sorties and waste of fuel for choppers but for the combined technology of GIS and GPS used by the forest department to map wildlife areas that gave the pilots the much-needed coordinates to carry out relief operations in the almost inaccessible Dzongu. Crafted by the forest department to prepare maps meant for delineation, protection and management of wildlife areas, the Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global...

As a national debate rages over the Indian poverty line, in the heart of Bandra, one of Mumbai’s richest suburbs, in a shanty with barely enough standing space for two adults, three-year-old Priya Doiphode, clad in a red tee shirt, lies listless on a string bed. Priya is one of the 83,243 children in Mumbai who are malnourished, according to government data, a statistic that makes Mumbai the most malnourished...