-Down to Earth Thousands of people working under NREGS bring a 38 km stream back from the dead in Uttar Pradesh Thirty nine-year-old Ram Ishwar gave up farming to pull a rickshaw outside the railway station in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur town. He says scarcity of water and a resultant increase in the cost of irrigation rendered farming unprofitable. Wheat production from his 0.4 hectare (ha) farmland shrank from one tonne to half...

-The Hindu The latest round of Annual Health Survey (AHS) has shown only marginal improvement in health indicators in the worst performing districts of the country. Bihar continues to have the highest percentage of girls marrying before completing 18. While the percentage during the baseline survey (2008-2010) was 20.2 per cent, it has now come down to 16.5 per cent. In Rajasthan the percentage has come down to 16.3 from 21.9. The...

-The Hindu     Insufficient number of classrooms, unusable toilets, no playground Chennai: Fifty-three percent of Adi Dravidar schools are functioning without sufficient number of classrooms in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu, according to a recent study conducted by Samakalvi Iyakkam, a movement for child rights. The Samakalvi Iyakkam-Tamilnadu conducted the study on 90 Adi Dravidar Welfare Schools in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram, Vellore, Tiruvannamalai and Vilupuram districts. In several places, as the boundaries were...

-Outlook Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government's 'Samajwadi Ambulance Service' may have been marred by controversy due to its name, but the ambulances under the scheme have seen the births of over 9,500 children in the state. "The ambulance service, which started on September 14 last by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has become birth place for 9,644 children. It included three families, which had twins and two families which had triplets. All these...

-BBC A survey done earlier this year shows that public facilities in the poorest regions of India have steadily expanded, improving the lives of people there, writes development economist Jean Dreze. Once upon a time, not so long ago, public facilities in the poorest districts of India were few and far between. Most people were left to their own devices and they lived in the shadow of hunger, insecurity and exploitation, with no...