MPLADS funds will only be used for the material component of the projects Federal lawmakers can now use their discretionary funds to finance work taken up under the government’s flagship jobs scheme, a move aimed at creating more lasting community assets in the villages. The government has decided to converge the Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). But MPLADS funds...

In the absence of legislation to protect women from sexual harassment at the workplace, the Supreme Court in 1997 laid down guidelines in the Vishaka vs State of Rajasthan in 1997. Thirteen years later, Parliament came up with the “Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill, 2010”. However, the Bill sees sexual harassment at the workplace not as a criminal offence but as a mere civil wrong, the...

With 21% of its population undernourished, nearly 44% of under-5 children underweight and 7% of them dying before they reach five years, India is firmly established among the world's most hunger-ridden countries. The situation is better than only Congo, Chad, Ethiopia or Burundi, but it is worse than Sudan, North Korea, Pakistan or Nepal. This is according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) which combines the above three indicators...

-PTI   Highlighting that 42 per cent children were underweight in a country witnessing high growth, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today described it as a national shame and said the government could not rely solely on ICDS, a programme for early childhood development, to address it.  "...The problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame. Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under-nutrition in the country is unacceptably high," he...

The use of tracker technology to zero in on the misuse of diagnostic techniques for sex determination has evoked mixed reactions. ONE of the least discussed issues in the context of the data thrown up by Census 2011 is the worrisome decline in the child sex ratio (CSR) and the not-too-perfect implementation of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, or PCPNDT Act. There is reason to...