-The Economic Times The rural development ministry has deepened its engagement with the Comptroller and Auditor-General. After the performance audit of NREGA, CAG will take up an audit of the Indira Awas Yojna. The audit of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which has an annual budget of 40,000 crore covers the period between 2007 and 2011. Rural development minister Jairam Rameshwill submit the report this winter session. "Every year, CAG...

Overlooked and ignored, the problem of untouchability continues to be practised and perpetrated in the country. It is a lifetime of MISery and humiliation, unimaginable for the relatively privileged but a daily reality for over one-fifth of the country’s 120 crore-plus population, as revealed succinctly in 22 short and easy to view videos under the Article 17 Campaign launched on April 14, 2012 by India Unheard, which claims to be...

-The EconoMISt West Bengal’s populist chief minister is doing badly. Yet she typifies shifts in power in India BUYER’S remorse is common enough in the dusty markets of Kolkata, a delightful if crumbling great city, once known as Calcutta and still capital of the state of West Bengal. Those who buy cheap plastic goods or plaster-of-Paris busts of Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s cultural hero, may come to regret their haste. Likewise, many who...

How an image-fixated chief minister has bent the state’s media to his will If you haven’t heard of an income tax raid on the residential preMISes of Nitish Kumar’s close aide and treasurer of the ruling Janata Dal-United (JD-U), Vinay Kumar Sinha, you are not alone. Thanks to the local media, it took a while even in Patna—where the house is located—for people to get to know. This, incidentally, is the...

Women in India face discrimination even when it comes to their heart health.  Three separate studies - one of them from India and the other two from China and West Asia - presented at the World Congress of Cardiology in Dubai on Friday said that women don't receive the same treatment as men for heart disease across the world.  They said that women with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) receive inferior or less...