-Reuters   After Indians migrate from rural to urban areas, the longer they live in a city the worse they score on measures of cardiac health and diabetes risk compared to those who remained in rural areas, according to an Indian study. Body fat, blood pressure and fasting insulin levels -- a measure of diabetes risk - all increased within a decade of moving to a city, and for decades after, blood...

Recently launched National Rural Livelihood Mission might help the government in getting desired results from its social benefit schemes. Seen as the next big rural project after the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, NRLM will provide a platform for formation of village groups that will then assist in fine-tuning existing government schemes. The government's expectations from NRLM stems from the instances of success in some states that have been able to...

A year before assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Planning Commission has ranked the state poorly on performance of 12 major flagship schemes of the Central government. The new analysis is likely to provide Congress ammunition against the Mayawati government on UP for not been able to utilize the Central government funds effectively. The new ranking, which is the part of annual state plan report for 2011-12, finds UP at the bottom...

Brinda Karat, Rajya Sabha member and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member, has protested against non-inclusion of disabled persons in the automatic inclusion category for the 2011 below the poverty line (BPL) census being conducted by the Rural Development Ministry. In a letter to Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, she has drawn attention to the May 2, 2003 Supreme Court order, in which the disabled have been listed in...

The ends may justify the means, but let's be clear - in Rural India, extremes of coercion are being used to encourage toilet use Robert Chambers recently wrote that community-led total sanitation is leading to a development revolution, especially in south Asia. I agree with his assessment of sanitation's importance. In practice, however, the success of community-led efforts often hinges on the use of outright coercion. In my experience, the measures...