-BBC A survey done earlier this year shows that public facilities in the poorest regions of India have steadily expanded, improving the lives of people there, writes development economist Jean Dreze. Once upon a time, not so long ago, public facilities in the poorest districts of India were few and far between. Most people were left to their own devices and they lived in the shadow of hunger, insecurity and exploitation, with no...

-Down to Earth State government yet to revoke ban on non-motorised transport despite repeated protests, calls from civil society and advisory from Union Ministry of Urban Development "I have been fined three times this month while delivering milk," says an angry Omkar Mandal. For over two decades now, Mandal has been cycling about 10 km every day to pick up and deliver milk. "Each time I have to pay Rs 120. How...

-The Hindu Nobel laureate Venkataraman ‘Venki' Ramakrishnan on Monday came down heavily on those opposed to genetic modification of agricultural crops. In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, he said there was definitely a need to be careful while dealing with GM crops with proper regulatory mechanism, but one should not ignore the tremendous potentials on offer such as in terms of developing drought resistant varieties and crops with more nutrients and...

-Governance Now Professor Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Lokniti, a research programme of the New Delhi-based think-tank Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and one of our leading ‘election watchers', maintains that we must not read too much in the higher voting numbers and credits the election commission for preparing more accurate voter rolls. Excerpts from an interview with Trithesh Nandan: * What do you make of the phenomenon of higher turnouts? Everybody...

-Frontline Childhood TB has been neglected for decades, but in the past few years the WHO has begun to realise its real impact in terms of incidence, prevalence and mortality. THE number of annual new tuberculosis (TB) cases in India has been nearly 2.2 million for the past couple of years. Many of these infected people would have been in contact with children aged under five years before being diagnosed and,...