-PTI Activists claim the facilities existed only on paper Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh): Toilets have gone “missing” from a house in a Chhattisgarh village and a woman and her daughter want the police to trace them fast. The women filed a written complaint with the police last week after they found out that the two toilets, proposed under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, were shown in documents as already having been constructed with funds released for...

-Livemint.com Abject poverty, high levels of debt, and crop failures among the leading causes behind farmer suicides, according to a study commissioned by agriculture ministry New Delhi: Abject poverty, high levels of indebtedness, crop failures and pressure to repay loans are among the leading causes behind farmer suicides, according to the preliminary findings of a study commissioned by the Union agriculture ministry. The broad findings of the study conducted by the Institute for...

-The Hindu Strategic shifts are needed in the level of government control on the financing and provision of health India spends close to 5% of its GDP on health. While this may appear low when compared to 18% of the U.S., data show that Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries spend 8-11%, middle-income countries close to 6%, and India’s peers, the lower-middle-income countries 4.5%. By these measures, India’s health-care spending,...

-PTI New Delhi: The government has made having an Aadhaar card must for poor women to avail of free cooking gas (LPG) connection under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. While the government in October last year had made the unique identification number mandatory for everyone to get LPG subsidies, it has now extended the same for free cooking gas connections to women of BPL households. The government had last year launched the Pradhan...

-The Indian Express The Aadhaar is no solution to the problems of the Midday Meal Scheme The Aadhaar scheme was initiated by the UPA government about seven years ago. But it is to the credit of the current Narendra Modi-led government that it saw the potential of Aadhar as an enabler of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes and used it for the dispersal of subsidies. But the government has got it wrong...