Misleading data cited in a seminar paper on the situation of the minority community in the State tend to detract from the Left Front government's exceptional record on this count. Abusaleh Shariff, the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, who was the Member-Secretary of the Sachar Committee, presented a paper on the socio-economic development of Muslims in West Bengal, at a seminar organised by the Institute of...

Free healthcare at state-of-the-art hospitals will soon be within reach of even those with meagre resources. The Jharkhand chapter of National Rural Health Mission is mulling a massive tie up with public sector units to provide free medical care to over 25 lakh people of the state who are living below the poverty line. State mission director Aradhana Patnaik, confirming the development, informed that major PSUs operating out of Jharkhand, including CCL,...

Jharkhand now boasts a healthy literacy figure of 67.63 per cent, up by almost 14 per cent since 2001. Thanks to the centrally-sponsored Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, almost all the 32,000 villages in the state now have schools compared to only 16,000 in 2000. Provisional census data released today suggests that literacy figures improved from 54 per cent in 2001 to nearly 68 per cent. Male literacy increased from 67 per cent in...

The battle against poverty and inequity can be won only if governments focus on the welfare of adolescents, says a UNICEF report. FINALLY, it has been recognised that adolescents constitute a very critical category in the overall battle against poverty and inequity. It is for this reason that the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) flagship report, “The State of the World's Children 2011”, focusses exclusively on adolescents and cautions against neglecting...

Many work in unscientifically built mines, employing crude methods and risking their lives The mines in Hazaribagh district are manned mostly by children aged between 7 and 17 Exposure to dust and coal particles has left them with respiratory problems Javir Kumar, 14, works in illegal coal mines, each a “rat hole,” 10x10 foot and 400 foot deep, where a mere slip of the foot will plunge one to a certain death. A large...