-The Indian Express A few years ago I met a woman, let's call her Chandibai, in a village outside Udaipur. A former panchayat member, she was now a leader in her village - a person to whom others (particularly other women) turned for help. She wore her mobile on a cord around her neck and had the panchayat president, the village development officer and even the district collector's office on speed...

-IPS News NEW DELHI: Despite being one of the world's fastest expanding economies, projected to clock seven-percent GDP growth in 2017, India - a nation of 1.2 billion - is TRAIling behind on many vital social development indices while also hosting one-fourth of the world's poor. While the United Nations prepares to wrap up a decade-and-a-half of poverty alleviation efforts, framed through the lens of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by the...

-The Hindu Business Line A flexible approach to collateral will improve access to bank funding. Red tapism too is a perennial concern If the Make in India campaign has to be successful and help many in our country, we need to focus on enabling small units to function and contribute. A major problem small and medium units face is that of finance. Banks and financial institutions are always very wary of assisting them...

-The Hindu Chennai: The reason why a large number of children under the age of five years die of diarrhoea and pneumonia, generally in rural India and especially in Bihar, has become clear. Diarrhoea and pneumonia are the biggest killer diseases in children in India. With 55 per 1,000 live births, Bihar has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. But 340 health care providers in rural Bihar rarely practice what...

-The Hindu Business Line Though migration of labour from the east has helped revive the plantations in southern India, questions remain on the long-term implications, Vishwanath Kulkarni reports As the harvest season starts in Coorg, Karnataka, coffee planter MC Kariappa has a lot of issues to contend with - productivity, weather and, the biggest worry of all in recent times, paucity of labourers. So when a dozen labourers from Assam landed at...