-The Hindu   Even villages with higher toilet coverage, and households that had some family members using the toilet did not see any difference in health Is building toilets improving health in India? New evidence has raised troubling questions about India's 25-year strategy of pushing people to use toilets as a way to improve health. In a paper published on Friday morning in the medical journal Lancet, researchers led by Thomas Clasen of the U.S.-based...

Documents availed through RTI reveals that the Rural Development minister Shri Nitin Gadkari has ordered to bring drastic changes in the schedule of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which includes changing the labour to material ratio and restricting the implementation of MGNREGA in 1/3rd of backward blocks in India (please click here to access a note on labour-material ratio prepared by People's Action for Employment Guarantee-PAEG). The MoRD has notified the...

-The Hindu Business Line India now has the technology to track leakages at each stage in the public distribution system The Government has set up the Expenditure Management Commission to rationalise subsidies, among other expenditure items in India. India incurs nearly one per cent of food subsidy annually, generally utilised under the existing public distribution system (PDS) consisting of Food Corporation of India (FCI) and nearly five lakh Fair Price Shops (FPSs)....

-FirstPost.com With the hype of his Madison Square Garden show overshadowing everything else, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's US visit was dubbed as a great bilateral victory for India. As the popular consensus went, Modi wowed both the Indian Americans and American politicians and even managed to get a joint op-ed article with President Barack Obama in the Washington Post stressing the importance of the partnership between the two countries. Was it really...

-Down to Earth Sivasankaran's land grabbing spree has threatened millions of livelihoods, says report Indian origin businessman Chinnakannan Sivasankaran has engaged in aggressive land grabbing of more than half a million hectares across Africa, Asia and South America, putting millions of livelihoods at risk. This was revealed in a detailed report released by Barcelona-based non-profit GRAIN on Tuesday. The report says Sivasankaran diverted 0.56 million hectares of food-producing land to production of palm...