Union minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh​ approved a plan to build a network of roads in rural Bihar under the ministry’s Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, clearing some of the hurdles that were holding up the construction. The ministry’s empowered panel on the rural road programme cleared the revised “core network” of roads for Bihar on 14 September. The core network includes all rural roads necessary to provide basic access to...

For promising results, renewed commitment of another seven years essential An official review of the Union Government's ambitious National Rural Health Mission has described it as a “minor success”, adding that the results have been heartening compared to past experience in public health programmes. If this promising programme is not to splutter to a stop, a renewed commitment for at least another period of seven years is essential, it says. A report...

The famine in the Horn of Africa is being seen as an inevitable consequence of drought, "the worst for 60 years". But this famine was almost entirely preventable, and presenting it as a natural disaster doesn't help; nor does our insistence on waiting for a major crisis before responding. Even though lessons about how to prevent famines have been documented time and time again, we don't learn. The conflict in Somalia...

Moving forward on the contention that reproductive right is also a human right, the civil society organisations in this backward district are contributing in their own little way to improve the reproductive and child health care. The Rogi Kalyan Samiti, as mandated under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), of the District Hospital here has taken up several initiatives to provide better facilities to the patients particularly for pregnant women. ``In...

Anna Hazare’s fast is over, but the conjuncture of which that fast was an episode is not: Hazare’s own movement, or other similar movements, are bound to recur in the coming months. The question naturally arises: what are these movements all about? And to start with: what was Hazare’s own movement all about? It was certainly not about “corruption” in any definable sense. That word meant different things to the...