Some of the Centre's flagship schemes aimed for rural development will be showcased at a special campaign from Wednesday. The Bharat Nirman public information campaign by Press Information Bureau (PIB) is aimed at reaching these projects to the rural areas and creating awareness about them. The three-day roadshow at Pandavapura in Mandya will have some 40 stalls wherein National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, National Rural Health Mission, Sarva Shikasha Abhiyan...

Activists and many residents blame a hydel project for the growing frequency of landslides in some Uttarakhand villages. THE nearly 3,500 residents of Bhatwadi village along the Uttarkashi-Gangotri highway in Uttarakhand saw their world come crashing down around them on the night of August 12/13. A massive landslide that hit the village formed cracks up to five metres wide on the highway and these crept up the hills to over 100...

Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...

A leading rights group has accused India of hoodwinking the public over its claims of improving maternal health, as renewed efforts began at the United Nations to cut global poverty. Human Rights Watch said the government in New Delhi was wrong to focus on the number of women who give birth in health facilities as a measure of progress rather than how many survive the delivery and post-delivery period. The group's Asia...

Most discussions on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) have focused on one of few things, the leakages in the implementation of the scheme, the inadequate number of jobs created, and some even talk of how NREGA has resulted in food inflation going up in various districts as well as increasing mechanisation due to unavailability of farm labour. It is, of course, true that you can’t have food inflation...