-The Times of India In the cleaning of nearly 13 lakh insanitary dry toilets across the country, human beings and animals play an almost equal role, the Supreme Court was told on Monday. In what could deal a severe blow to the sanitation claims of successive governments, petitioner NGO 'Safai Karmachari Andolan' culled out data from the 2011 census report to inform the court that 4.97 lakh dry toilets were "serviced by...

-The Hindu Stereotypical government policies and global approaches persist in family planning programmes. Urmila is a 40-year-old domestic worker in western Uttar Pradesh. The mother of six children, all girls, she is now pregnant again and is keen on carrying on with the pregnancy. Her husband is unemployed and is an alcoholic. His relatives have assured her that they will help her to bring up the child and have also hinted...

Two sets of government data on UPA government's most famous flagship programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), for which Rs. 33000 crore was earmarked in 2012-13 budget, provide widely different figures for several states, a feature which experts say is indicative of the corruption in the scheme and weakness of social audit or accountability. The government has increasingly relied on Management Information System (MIS) for monitoring NREGA at...

-The Hindu Government plans to roll out 12th Plan The National Advisory Council (NAC) is meeting here on Friday to sort out differences between the Planning Commission and the Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare over the proposed National Health Mission. The Government plans to roll out the 12th Plan. The implementation of the Universal Health Coverage, as recommended by the High Level Expert Group, will also be discussed. The Planning Commission wants...

-The Hindustan Times Indira Gandhi National Open University, India’s largest distance learning varsity, allowed over a dozen private firms to offer its degrees and diplomas, violating rules and costing the public exchequer over Rs. 300 crores. The CBI is set to probe a series of MoUs signed by IGNOU under its former Vice Chancellor VN Rajasekharan Pillai with private firms that earned crores offering IGNOU degrees between 2006 and 2011, agency sources said.   Pillai,...