-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Large numbers of poor and vulnerable are exposed to risks and unexpected difficulties like unemployment, ill health, and natural disasters, an Asian Development Bank ( ADB) study says, because of lack of adequate social protection systems in many fast-growing middle-income countries in Asia and the Pacific. The Social Protection Index: Assessing Results for Asia and the Pacific-released on Wednesday gives India a score of 0.051, below most...

-The Indian Express Shirwani, Pitora, Deoli (Uttarakhand): Over a fortnight after the flash-floods, while many villages remain inaccessible by road, tragic stories are emerging from areas where dirt tracks have been opened up. About seven kilometres from Guptkashi, the six-odd hamlets that comprise the Deoli-Bramhagram panchayat have reported 57 men missing, and the area is fast getting the tag of the "village of widows". For about six months of the year,...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

-Down to Earth About nine million women went out of the job market in the rural areas between 2009-10 and 2011-12, a grim facet of the employment crisis in the countryside The dismal trend in India's jobless growth story was reinforced when the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released the highlights of its 68th round of its surveys, conducted from July 2011 to June...

-The Hindu In this time of adversity, while there are food, water and biscuits, there is also politics Dehradun: Uttarakhand is abuzz with helicopters whirring in the skies, Ministers from all over the country are chipping in with aid, money is flooding the Uttarakhand Disaster Management and Mitigation Centre. All this has happened this past week after massive rains and floods ravaged the Himalayan State. Politics too reared its ugly head in the...