Audits will look into the money released to the states in the last seven years, says Ghulam Nabi Azad The health ministry will conduct annual audits of the National rural Health Mission (NRHM) to detect irregularities in the utilization of funds. Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has written to the state governments seeking their cooperation on this. “We have decided to go for an audit of NRHM fund utilization across the states,”...

Uttar Pradesh, which supposedly has a high proportion of the country's poor, has not begun the job of enumerating them even three-and-a-half months after the first deadline set by the Centre lapsed. The project started in June 2011, with the target of completing the job by the end of 2011. The Centre then extended the deadline to April. Bihar has covered just 0.1% of the population. While there is no word from...

Jairam Ramesh asks Azad not to wind up health survey rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has urged health and family welfare minister Ghulam Nabi Azad not to discontinue the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), till a credible alternative is in place. In a 22 April letter, a copy of which has been reviewed by ‘Mint’, Ramesh questioned the comparability of data generated by the annual health survey (AHS) or the district level...

What better elixir than pure water? Thanks to Naandi, a safe drinking water programme, 3,90,536 households in rural areas across four Indian states are benefited.  Naandi, headquartered in Hyderabad, is a not-for-profit organization which works with governing bodies in rural areas, including Karnataka, to provide clean drinking water to the poor. So what really is their modus operandi? It is essentially a community-run programme where the local governing body or gram...

-PTI A 13-year-old gangrape victim allegedly committed suicide after she was not allowed to file a police complaint allegedly by the local panchayat, who reportedly let off the rapists with a mere warning. The girl allegedly committed suicide by hanging herself with a dupatta in her house in the Garhmukteshwar town under Panchsheel Nagar district, 70 km from here, on Saturday evening, the police said. The victim was allegedly gangraped by three youths...