-San Francisco Chronicle   Bihar's chief minister, Nitish Kumar, who runs India's poorest and one of its most corrupt regions, announced a novel bid to tackle endemic poverty: taking the state's bureaucrats out of governing. His administration placed advertisements in newspapers this week, seeking a team of professionals to manage a $1.3 billion annual budget for programs involving job creation, housing, infrastructure and microfinance. In Bihar, a state of 103 million people in...

China has reduced deaths among newborn babies by almost two-thirds in little over a decade — an unprecedented success rate that a new study says holds lessons for countries like India still struggling with high neonatal and maternal mortality rates. Deaths among newborn babies fell from 24.7 per 1,000 in 1996 to 9.3 in 2008 — a 62-per-cent decrease — according to a paper published in The Lancet medical journal on...

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...

Managing our soil and water resources in a sustainable and equitable manner needs a new political vision, which can be expressed through the proposed Land Acquisition Bill and the recently formed Global Soil Partnership. On the basis of a proposal I had made three years ago, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) launched a Global Soil Partnership for Food Security and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation at a multi-stakeholder conference, held...

National Infrastructure Equity Audit conducted in 125 gram panchayats in five States There is a continued prevalence of deep-rooted caste-based inequity in the contribution and availability of infrastructure and, hence, of the accessibility of services and entitlements, a report has suggested. The Scheduled Castes (SC), the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and minorities do not have access to functional infrastructure facilities as they are ‘merely situated in the general or backward classes habitations,' according...