-NDTV Our journey takes us to five villages in Sehore district, Madhya Pradesh, to meet families that do not have a toilet at home. Nearly 65 per cent of households in rural areas of the state are without toilets. Prema and Tanu belong to a Scheduled Caste family of daily wagers in Ahlada Kheda. Students of Class 9 and 10, they are exposed to children from different socioeconomic backgrounds at...

-The Telegraph Prithla (Haryana): The noise from the factories and traffic cannot drown out the slogan resonating along the Delhi-Mathura highway, demanding a right to land for all and the scrapping of the land acquisition ordinance. "Sabki bhuk mitana hai to bhumi grahan ardhyadesh radh karo, bhumi samasya hal karo (To remove hunger, dump the ordinance and solve the problem of the landless)," goes the chant. Some 5,000 landless people and marginal farmers...

-IPS News NEW DELHI: Despite being one of the world's fastest expanding economies, projected to clock seven-percent GDP growth in 2017, India - a nation of 1.2 billion - is trailing behind on many vital social development indices while also hosting one-fourth of the world's poor. While the United Nations prepares to wrap up a decade-and-a-half of poverty alleviation efforts, framed through the lens of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by the...

-The Hindu Business Line Though migration of labour from the east has helped revive the plantations in southern India, questions remain on the long-term implications, Vishwanath Kulkarni reports As the harvest season starts in Coorg, Karnataka, coffee planter MC Kariappa has a lot of issues to contend with - productivity, weather and, the biggest worry of all in recent times, paucity of labourers. So when a dozen labourers from Assam landed at...

-The Indian Express The Congress may be quick to attack the ruling NDA government for attempting to dilute the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) since it came to power, and for its poor implementation this year, but the high-profile constituencies of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi have performed dismally under the scheme, ranking below the national average on most key parameters. MGNREGA, introduced in...