Two-and-A-half years ago, Kandhamal was tagged as a “national shame”, after communal violence triggered by the killing of a Hindu seer left 38 people dead, with houses and churches burnt and vandalised, and thousands of people homeless. But on February 2, Kandhamal is set to get a different tag — one of “national pride” — as the Union Ministry of Rural Development awards it for being one of the top 10...

Thiruvoipati Nandakumar How is better delivery expected by allocating more foodgrains, when the system is not equipped to handle even the current level of allocation? The debate about the proposed national food security act seems to be centred on the magnitude of the allocation of food grains. But the issue is far beyond only foodgrains. It is about improving health, sanitation and nutrition standards so that India’s human development goals can be...

The Planning Commission has decided to disown the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) for Selected Tribal and Backward Districts that it authored and was approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) — in a vastly amended form — in November last. Currently being implemented in 60 Left wing extremist (LWE)-affected districts, the plan was watered down by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) before it received the CCEA nod. Having...

NC Saxena , the influential former bureaucrat who is a member of the National Advisory Council, has raised the ineffectiveness of government programmes among tribal people in a paper that will come up for discussion before the Sonia-Gandhi headed council. The government relied on a report by Saxena last year in denying clearance to a large mining project by Vedanta Resources in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills . This had attracted international...

Union rural development and panchayati raj minister C P Joshi on Wednesday suggested that the re c o rd s maintained under the M a h at m a Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme could be used to identify the poor to prepare the BPL census 2011. Emphasising the need for a one-dimensional reference for surveying the BPL families, Joshi said that identifying the ‘real’ poor was getting tougher in...