-The Hindustan Times The country is ostensibly in the throes of a great social movement for sanitation. Gandhi's name is evoked, Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads from the front, ministers lift brooms for cameras, and officers, college and school children take oaths against littering and to clean their surroundings. Earlier the PM pledges in his Independence Day speech toilets for girls and boys in all schools. It appears that the squalor of...

-Live Mint Recurring accidents highlight social tolerance for a state where the homeless risk their lives to sleep a few hours One more blood-drenched road accident. Another soul-numbing statistic. A drunken man, driving at night at crazy speeds, loses control, lunges on to a road divider, crushing 13 sleeping men. Newspapers report, the driver is arrested but released on bail next day. People forget, until the next crash. In Delhi, there were...

-NDTV Cooks While most of the country celebrates India's 68th Independence Day, a large part of it suffers in silence. This report doesn't intend to dampen the high spirits of people looking forward to a long weekend, but simply to point out a dark and undeniable truth. India is a malnutrition hotspot, one where half of its children are known to be chronically malnourished. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), out...

-The Business Standard/ Agencies   1,500 villages under water; Assam, Bihar too affected  Lucknow/ New Delhi: Floods triggered by heavy rains in the Himalayas have inundated nearly 1,500 villages in Uttar Pradesh, killing at least 28 people and leaving thousands homeless, officials said on Sunday. Thousands were marooned in villages across nine districts of Uttar Pradesh, where the release of water from overflowing dams in neighbouring Nepal has added to the impact of the...

As the country celebrates 68th anniversary of her independence this year, recent data from the Census 2011 reveals that the population of homeless declined by 8.8% between 2001 and 2011 to reach 17.7 lakhs. This means that 4.5 lakh households (of average household size 3.9) still do not have any shelter to sleep safely. Although the percentage share of homeless in total population is miniscule (i.e. 0.15%), in absolute numbers...