-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The government's earnestness to change the lives of millions untouched by high-street banks is being tested with a proposal from its own department of posts. Armed with an amazing network of offices, the department has sought Rs 1,900 crore from the Centre to launch a bank that would connect with the aam aadmi in Indian villages and far-flung areas where few institutional lenders have a presence. Financial...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: After the ambitious food security law, the UPA government is preparing another populist scheme to expand the supply of subsidised edible oil and pulses through the countrywide network of ration shops in the next two to three months. "It will be the next major thing. We are working at the earliest. We propose that state governments purchase pulses and edible oil either through imports or locally. We...

-The Hindu Indentured labour may be a forgotten part of our colonial economic history but Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh are still sending ‘Girmitya' to toil in distant lands The descendants of indentured labourers, who migrated from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to erstwhile colonies, recently met at The Hague in the Netherlands to commemorate 140 years of migration - perpetuated through a system popularly known as ‘Girmit.' They gathered from all...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Several nutrition experts and members of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, the largest association of paediatricians in India, have warned that the new set of papers on malnutrition published in the medical journal, Lancet, "should not be allowed to become an opportunity for commercial exploitation of malnutrition". "The call for engaging with the "private sector" and unregulated marketing of commercial foods for preventing malnutrition in children...

-The Hindu There has to be a national mission to ensure that rural homes have access to clean cooking fuel and stoves instead of the killer chulhas that are claiming the lives of large numbers of women A large section of our country's population, nearly 75 per cent of rural and 22 per cent of urban households, still uses biomass for daily cooking. An estimated 80 per cent of the residential energy...