-IndiaSpend.com It was raining heavily last monsoon when Heerabai’s youngest child, Seshkumari, 4, collapsed with a fever. The family could only watch helplessly as her temperature soared and she turned delirious late night. The nearest primary health centre for Pachkol, Heerabai’s village in Chhindwara district in south-west Madhya Pradesh, is 25 km away. And every monsoon, the swollen Bhagbhel river floods the road linking the village to the health centre. If you...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

-NDTV KOLKATA: As if the death of 19 tribal children in Odisha due to malnutrition was not bad enough, a minister in Naveen Patnaik’s government has now blamed the disaster on the large size of tribal families. “Each tribal family has 8-9 children. There’s no family planning and therefore the malnutrition deaths,” Minister of Women and Child Welfare Usha Devi said. “They also won’t come down from their village in the hill,” she...

-The Hindu Confining it to just the Ministry of Rural Development would be the most retrograde step in democratic decentralisation in over a quarter century. If, as The Hindu’s exclusive on Wednesday indicates, Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to close down the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, it would confirm one’s worst fears about his government’s hypocritical approach to grass-roots democracy for grass-roots development. This was a lacuna that was evident in the ‘Gujarat...

-The Indian Express The investigation suggests the irregularities began in 2013. Mumbai: In Maharashtra’s Nandurbar district, Central funds to be received by tribal families under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) for construction of dug-wells on farmlands were allegedly siphoned off before any benefit could be passed on to the beneficiaries, an investigation by the state’s tribal development department has found. It has also been found that officials involved in the racket had submitted...