-The Indian Express The recently-released India Rural Development Report, which is endorsed by the government, says 7% of the rural population is ‘very poor’; villages in eastern Indian states are the worst affected. A World Bank report released this week has proposed a new way to measure poverty, which suggests that India may have been overestimating the number of its poor. According to a separate set of figures and analysis endorsed by...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Showing remarkable progress, 89 lakh individual household latrines have been built in rural areas in the past one year. According to government figures, the big Swachh Bharat push in rural areas has increased the access of toilets to 46.9% from only 32.6% in 2011 across the country. However, urban areas in poll-bound Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have built only 927 and 862 household latrines respectively...

-The Hindu The murder of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri should come as no surprise to those who have been closely following the ground level politics in western Uttar Pradesh. The murder of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, on the edge of the national capital, by a violent Hindu mob on Wednesday should come as no surprise to those who have been closely following the ground level politics in western Uttar Pradesh and the...

-The Times of India Politicians might try hard to push Hindi, but people are voting with their feet, opting to put their children in English-medium schools. While overall enrolment in schools went up by just 7.5% between 2008-09 and 2013-14, and enrolment in Hindi-medium schools went up by about 25%, enrolment in English-medium schools almost doubled in the same period. While the number of English-medium school students is still dwarfed by those in...

-The Hindu India spends less of its GDP on health than some of the world’s poorest countries’ Every government hospital serves an estimated 61,000 people in India, with one bed for every 1833 people, new official data shows. In undivided Andhra Pradesh, every government hospital serves over 3 lakh patients while in Bihar, there is only one bed for every 8800 people. Union Minister for Health J.P. Nadda released the National Health Profile...