-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today sought the response of the Centre and the Election Commission on a joint petition filed by NGOs challenging amendments to the 2016 and 2017 Finance Acts that allegedly allow unfettered donations by corporate houses in India and foreign entities to parties in the name of "political bonds". According to advocates Prashant Bhushan and Neha Rathi, appearing for the NGOs Association of Democratic Reforms and...
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Has the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Brought a Paradigm Shift in Rural Sanitation? -Santosh Mehrotra and Vinod Mishra
-TheWire.in Innovate methods are being used to encourage people to end open defecation, but issues like the underutilisation of funds and use of coercive methods to achieve targets remain. The government has run rural sanitation programmes since the 1980s. Yet, according to Census 2011, only about 30% of all rural households have toilets, and even fewer use those toilets. By contrast, under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, several changes have taken place. Efforts towards...
More »Missing the point of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
-Livemint.com The government should put greater emphasis on behaviour change than construction of toilets In 2014, more than half of India’s population still practised open defecation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi set his government the goal of making the country open defecation-free in five years, by the 150th anniversary of M.K. Gandhi’s birthday in 2019, by launching the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA). Three years later, we are more than halfway into that period,...
More »Ranchi civic body disrobes those defecating in the open -Kelly Kislaya
-The Times of India RANCHI: Several men in the city were in for a surprise on Sunday morning when Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) personnel forcibly took away their lungis as punishment for defecating in the open. The clothes were given back only after they took a pledge never to answer the call of nature in the open. Part of RMC's campaign `Halla Bol Lungi Khol Abhiyan' which was launched on Sunday ,...
More »Guardians of the grain -Chitrangada Choudhury
-The Hindu Over the years we have lost over a lakh varieties of native rice. One district in Odisha is rediscovering some of them It is a balmy winter morning when I meet Kamli Bataraa, an ebullient Adivasi farmer, at her home in Belugan, in southern Odisha’s Koraput district. There is a hum across the village from the threshing of just-harvested paddy. When I ask Kamli about the rice varieties she grows,...
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