-The Hindu A campaign launched by a community service institution to make selected villages in Bharatpur district of Rajasthan shed the below poverty line (BPL) tag has immensely benefited the poor families in the region and facilitated creation of new employment opportunities, small entrepreneurships and income-generating ventures. The youth and women are especially getting involved in new enterprises in large numbers. Kheria Purohit village in Deeg tehsil of Bharatpur district, where 15...

-The Hindu The Planning Commission’s draft 12th Plan for health has attracted much debate and controversy. Critics have been quick to direct their attention at two issues in it — the proposed increase in government health spending from one per cent to 1.58 per cent of GDP, and the “managed care model.” The spending increase was rightly felt to be grossly inadequate to move India towards achieving universal health care. The...

-The Hindu Activists of several rights groups held a protest here on Tuesday calling for mining group Vedanta Resources, an FTSE 100 company, to be struck off from the London Stock Exchange because of its controversial trade practices and human rights record. Carrying banners and raising slogans against its policies, the protesters gathered outside the venue of the company’s annual general meeting in central London and booed its shareholders as they arrived. Senior...

-The Hindu Imperative to collect and analyse data in such cases India calls them its future. But as lakhs of children are kidnapped across the country each year, pushed into sex or organ trade or bonded labour, precious little is being done to find and restore them to their parents. For these children, it is living through the worst nightmare. Getting lost in markets and seeing strange faces all around may put a...

-Frontline Health activists say the health chapter of the Twelfth Plan document exaggerates the role of the private sector in providing health care. The draft chapter on health for the Twelfth Five Year Plan document not only is grossly inadequate in its approach but exaggerates to unrealistic levels the role of the private sector in providing health care. It invokes the concept of universal health care (UHC), but, critics say, it...