-The Indian Express As efforts are made to make India open defecation free by 2019, the biggest stumbling block is not the lack of enough toilets, but the difficulty in convincing people to start using them. New Delhi: Despite freshly-constructed functioning toilets in their homes, a group of old men in a village in Daniyawan block, about 30 km southeast of Patna city, continued to go out in the fields to defecate....

-The Hindu Business Line The National e-Governance Plan can ensure that higher devolution of funds translates into improved outcomes Cutting edge technology is, no doubt, empowering. The right application of technology can boost productivity in all sectors of the economy: agriculture, manufacturing, services, business and governmental activities. Technology enables informed decision-making, stakeholder participation and efficient service delivery and can help ensure transparency, accountability, and rule of law leading to inclusive good governance....

-The Hindu Officials are still in the process of finding out requirements across the State Chennai: Nearly one month after the State government announced that breakfast will be provided in schools as part of noon meal scheme, officials are still figuring out the modalities of implementation, including the food variety and age group to be covered. “We are surveying the requirements across the State,” said a senior official from the Department of Social...

-NDTV Jaipur: 75-year-old Hanja Bai's pension stopped unexpectedly. A resident of a village in Rajasthan's Rajsamand district has trouble walking, has a hearing impairment and the Rs. 750 a month is her only means to survive. So she decided to pay the regional pension office a visit.   Without a pension for six months, Hanja took the expensive trip to the office, but only to be shocked.   "I went to the office in the...

-The Hindu Confining it to just the Ministry of Rural Development would be the most retrograde step in democratic decentralisation in over a quarter century. If, as The Hindu’s exclusive on Wednesday indicates, Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to close down the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, it would confirm one’s worst fears about his government’s hypocritical approach to grass-roots democracy for grass-roots development. This was a lacuna that was evident in the ‘Gujarat...