The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) on Saturday urged the Centre to coordinate with all State and local governments and also Central government departments, including the Railways, to ensure that the pernicious practice of manual scavenging is fully abolished the latest by the end of the 11th Plan period. This, it said, would require a new survey in every State and Union Territory, with wide public involvement, of the remaining...

Expressing 'deep distress' over the 'shameful practice of manual scavenging' in the country, the National Advisory Council, headed by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Saturday asked the government to 'fully abolish' it by the end of 2012. It observed that despite the practice of employing scavengers being declared an offence, no one has been punished for it. The issue is seen as 'an issue of sanitation than of issue of human dignity,'...

The Millennium Development declaration was a visionary document, which sought partnership between rich and poor nations to make globalisation a force for good. Its signatories agreed to explicit goals on a specific timeline. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set ambitious targets for reducing hunger, poverty, infant and maternal mortality, for reversing the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and giving children basic education by 2015. These also included gender equality,...

Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad called for a "jihad" against tobacco use after a report released on Tuesday identified India as the world's second largest consumer of tobacco. An estimated 274.9 million Indians consume tobacco, the first Global Adult Tobacco Survey said. Nearly 0.9 million tobacco-related deaths occur in India annually as compared to 5.5 million world wide. India is also the world's third largest producer of tobacco, the report added. "A...

 Adolescent girls from 22 districts of the state will now get Centre’s support to continue education and receive complete nutrition. The Centre has chosen 22 districts from Uttar Pradesh to implement the Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent girls (RGSEAG-Sabla). To be formally launched across 200 districts in the country from mid-November, the scheme aims to empower out-of-school girls ¿ by educating them and providing them with nutritional support. The Department...