In Uttar Pradesh's most impoverished region, Bundelkhand, government officials feed off not just the living but also the dead. Headlines Today has exposed how corrupt officials exploit the grieving families of farmers, who have committed suicide.   In a visit to Bundelkhand in 2008, AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi repeated a phrase borrowed from his father Rajiv Gandhi: "Out of 100 paise, only 15 paise reaches the poor".   While travelling through this dustbowl...

Everything is in short supply here, especially hope. There was a flicker of it, though, when on April 30 Prime Minister Manmohan Singhcame here with Rahul Gandhi. Maybe the people were expecting a miracle, an end to the misery created by season after season of bad crops and the resultant rising debt. Their hope proved to be short-lived. Since then, nine farmers have killed themselves in Banda district alone, the...

India finds itself bracketed with countries like Philippines and Cambodia, rated as the fourth most corrupt nation among 16 countries of the Asia Pacific region surveyed by leading Hong Kong-based business consultancy firm PERC. The Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd (PERC) rated India at 8.67 on a scale of zero to 10 with the high end being the worst case of corruption scenario and ahead of the Philippines (8.9 points),...

In letters to Prime Minister, he pitches for the project to continue and vouches for rehabilitation Digvijay urged Manmohan to get Environment Ministry to withdraw order suspending work He also said the State had made substantial progress in rehabilitation While he seldom misses an opportunity to attack the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government in Madhya Pradesh, documents recently accessed through the Right to Information Act show that the former Chief Minister and AICC...

Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has launched a legal battle, one day after he was sacked from the Grameen microfinance bank he founded. Prof Yunus lodged a case in Bangladesh's High Court challenging his dismissal from the post, lawyers said. The central bank sacked him saying he was past retirement age and had been improperly installed in his post. Grameen Bank disputes the accusations. He has been under pressure from the government to...