-Press Information Bureau The India Rural Development Report 2012/13 was released here by Shri Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Rural Development, Government of India. The Report was prepared by IDFC Foundation in collaboration with network partners, the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), the Institute for Rural Management Anand (IRMA), and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), with contributions from several other researchers, experts and civil society organisations. On...

-The Hindu It is premature to speak of a ‘new Bihar' based on the experience of a compressed time-frame Rekindling Governance and Development: Edited by N. K. Singh, Nicholas Stern; HarperCollins Publishers, A-53, Sector 57, Noida-201301. Rs. 699. The editors of this book have gathered a panel of stellar luminaries to valorise their notion of ‘The New Bihar'. Learned, laudatory essays extol the sea-change wrought by the NDA government since it came to...

-The Hindu As cities expand and markets keep fuel prices high, Indians are demanding better public transport. The States must deliver, but they are only inching ahead. In the chorus of angry voices against the horrific gang rape of a paramedic student on a moving bus in the national capital on December 16 last, one issue that quickly became apparent was the state of public transport in urban areas. The shocking incident...

-The Hindu Biomass cookstoves and solar lighting improve the health of women and are creating business models that empower them Around the world three billion people have no access to modern cooking fuels. They depend mostly on direct burning of solid biomass for cooking and heating. The smoke from these rudimentary stoves causes some four million deaths annually, destroys millions of tonnes of crops and leads to global warming and large-scale regional...

-The Hindu The move to redefine 'handloom' is in the interest of powerloom operators who will be able to corner benefits meant for weavers "Any loom, other than powerloom; and includes any hybrid loom on which, at least one process for weaving requires manual intervention or human energy for production." (The new definition of handloom proposed by Ministry of Textiles) The textile industry in India comprises three sectors - the mill, the powerloom and...