-The Hindu Bezwada Wilson has won Magsaysay Award for his struggle against manual scavenging. Chennai: Fifty-year-old Bezwada Wilson, national convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), was declared one of the six recipients of the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award by the Philippines-based award foundation, in Manila on Wednesday. Recognised for his efforts to eradicate manual scavenging, Mr. Wilson told The Hindu that India still had over two lakh manual scavengers who needed...

-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 Also, the lack of co-ordination between health and Women and Child Development (WCD) departments has also been highlighted in the report. Ahmedabad: WITH OVER 1.45 lakh children under the age of six in Gujarat identified with the Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM), the state fails to identify any specific targets in their mission statements to overcome malnutrition, reveals the latest edition of Global Nutrition Report (GNR). Also, the lack...

Although public goods are meant for everyone to enable living life with human dignity, certain groups are systematically deprived to access them, says a new report from the Centre for Equity Studies -- a NGO based in Delhi. Put differently, not all sections of the society are able to access or enjoy public goods and services on an equal footing, despite social justice being one of the key provisions of...

-The Hindu ‘Groundwater will not be a free resource’   New Delhi: The government has for the first time said that citizens had a right to safe water and laid out stringent rules on how corporations and large entities can extract groundwater in two separate pieces of draft legislation uploaded on the website of the Union Water Ministry and open for public comment. The Bills —in a first — also propose fines ranging from...