Last summer, about 150 families of Kachan village in Jharkhand’s Palamu district decided to pool funds to repair their only community tube well. A drought, the worst in many years, had dried up two ponds; there were no wells around; and the tube well had been dysfunctional for a year. It took a lot of hardship and one whole month for them to put together what the mechanic had asked...

The Centre is planning to undertake an ambitious effort to create a national population register — a proposal that has surfaced in various forms in the past as well — which will document biometric information and photos of all "usual residents" of India above the age of 15. While previous governments have also considered such a scheme, with the NDA wanting to restrict this to a citizen's register when it...

This is one world No. 1 tag that 'emerging India' would love to shed. Indians comprised 58% of all people across the world who regularly defecated in the open in 2008. That's more than half the Indian population (54%), a WHO-UNICEF report said. While 18% of urban India indulged in the practice, the percentage was as high as 69% in rural parts of the country. Globally, 1.1 billion people still...

A group comprising 24 development journalists from 21 countries of Asia, Africa and South America visited the Centre for Community Economics and Development Consultants' Society here over the weekend to get exposure to grassroots work in community mobilisation, poverty alleviation and women's empowerment. The mid-career journalists are attending a four-month course conducted under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation and Special Commonwealth African Assistance Plan of the Ministry of External Affairs...

Sugar prices have been rising, and the government has been offering sweet nothings. But on Tuesday the entire Opposition - even UPA's allies - will put the government in the dock over price rise. At this juncture, a notification by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) is certainly bad news for the beleaguered government. Though sugar exports are banned, the DGFT issued a notice on February 15 allocating 10,000 Metric tonnes...