Cabinet clears change in divorce law: Women to get part of husband’s property In a move that could be a setback to land acquisition for commercial use, a parliamentary committee unanimously recommended that the government should not acquire land for industrial, commercial or for-profit enterprises or private companies. Instead, the panel, which has proposed legislation favouring landowners, recommends that private companies and public-private partnerships would have to buy land in the open...

-The Hindu Costing Rs.37, 000 with DRDA grant of Rs.9, 000 The first ‘zero waste toilet system' (ZWTS) in the country was inaugurated at Evoor village near Musiri on Thursday by Collector Jayashree Muralidharan. This is an integrated urine diversion biogas linked flush toilet system and has five modules-a flush out toilet, a bathroom, a urine diversion bowl, a cultivated wetland for treating bathroom water, and a biogas plant. The Collector said that the...

 Twenty-two newbie managers, fresh from B-schools across India, are raring to go. Only, they won’t make spreadsheets to sell soaps or fizzy drinks. From June, they will assist senior bureaucrats across 11 districts of Jharkhand where the Centre is funding uplift schemes. These managers — from IIT-Kharagpur, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)-Mumbai, Visva-Bharti in Bengal’s Santiniketan, XISS-Ranchi, XLRI-Jamshedpur and others — are Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows in some of...

-The Economist An absence of optimism plays a large role in keeping people trapped in poverty THE idea that an infusion of hope can make a big difference to the lives of wretchedly poor people sounds like something dreamed up by a well-meaning activist or a tub-thumping politician. Yet this was the central thrust of a lecture at Harvard University on May 3rd by Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute...

-The Economist HOW should one judge the lot of women in India, a country that is in many ways progressive, modern, tolerant and yet by turns repressive and hostile? Women hold the highest political positions (the presidency, speaker of parliament, leader of the ruling party, leader of the opposition in parliament, several chief ministers of large states) and in theory they are protected by a variety laws promoting equality. Though development indicators...