-Livemint.com Despite improvements over the past few years, accessing clean water is a big challenge in rural India Women in Indian villages have borne the brunt of water scarcity for a long time. Tales of young women missing out on school or college to fetch water for their families are common across the Indian countryside even today. But then there are extreme examples, such as the village of Denganmal, 150 kilometres...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Scientists are now scrambling to retrieve whatever data they can from a network of 293 ground motion sensors in cities and towns across northern and eastern India that was offline and cut off from the research community during the Nepal earthquakes. The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the earth sciences ministry will send a team to retrieve any records of ground acceleration from instruments in Uttarakhand, while...

-Tehelka PeeBuddy is India’s first attempt at solving the health issue of contracting UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) every time a woman reluctantly decides to use a toilet of dubious sanitary standards in a public establishment. This is a country where 1.2 billion of its populace is used to not having proper public toilets, and women are more susceptible to assaults because they do not have a toilet in their homes. Hence, it...

-The Indian Express A little more than a week ago, World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for launching the Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), which he called an “extraordinary effort” at financial inclusion. According to the Union finance ministry, India has attained 99 per cent financial inclusion, measured as households’ access to bank accounts. Within three months of launching the PMJDY, the government entered the Guinness...

Social justice is one of the basic pillars of democracy. But when it comes to livelihood security and socio-economic status of various communities in rural areas, persons belonging to Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) lag far behind the upper caste population. This has been revealed in a recent National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) report entitled: Employment and Unemployment Situation among Social Groups in India...