The rural development ministry has drawn out a plan to spend as much as Rs 2 lakh crore on two of its major schemes — Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) and the Swarna Jayanti Gramin Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY). The ministry, however, has left it to the government and the plan panel to decide the timeline over which these funds should be spent. The plan panel has indicated that it wants...

Fourteen-year-old Shafat Ahmad works as a domestic helper in the house of a Srinagar-based government employee in Kashmir. His younger sister embroiders shawls in an unregistered textile venture in her native village of Beeru. "When my father first brought me here, my employer promised to send me to school," Shafat told IPS. Though he is keen to pursue his education, he has yet to attend a single class. The Ahmed siblings' story...

In one little patch of Maharashtra, a lot, it seems, lies in a name. About 175 girls whose names mean “unwanted” in Marathi will be re-christened in a public ceremony next week in a novel initiative to fight female foeticide. The Satara zilla parishad in west Maharashtra has found in a survey of the district that parents with many girl children often name them Nakusa, Nakoshi or Nakushi, all meaning “unwanted” or...

The Union government is inclined to examine specific requirements of States individually while implementing the proposed legislation on food security. When it was brought to his attention that crores of people in the State would be left out of the Public Distribution System as the ceiling for coverage of urban population stipulated in the draft National Food Security Bill was 50 per cent and the provisional figures of Census 2011 pointed...

-Live Mint   As United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi prepares to intervene next week in the great national debate about who is poor, she might want to visit north-eastern Mumbai to see how the poorest are not even classified as such and how a giant government scheme to save their children from malnutrition is failing. The nauseating stench from a mountain of garbage greets a visitor to Rafi Nagar at the base...