-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The UPA is strenuously denying that this campaign is its earthy version of the NDA's "India Shining" campaign, but few are buying the denials. Launched as a "multi-media" campaign to highlight its achievements in two successive terms at the Center, it has been christened by political observers are UPA's " Bharat Smiling" campaign. The spirit of the campaign, says the publicity material given out by the...

-The Hindu   Investment in a scheme that guarantees rural employment with minimum wages should be seen as complementary and not alternative to development activities A recent paper by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has argued that the "push" factors of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) are not as important as the economic growth "pull" factors, for increasing agricultural wages. The paper has received wide media...

-The Times of India A study on the causes of severe diarrhoea in young children, conducted at seven sites in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asian countries including India, has found that rotavirus is responsible for most such cases. The Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS), published in the latest issue of Lancet, shows diarrhoeal disease, which is responsible for one in every ten child deaths during the first five years of life worldwide,...

-The Telegraph Bengal - Defrauded Many households in Calcutta have a domestic help or a driver who has lost money by investing in Saradha schemes - a common thread that has spun a perception that the poor are the sole victims of the sham company. But Sudipta Sen's promise of high returns had blurred the divide between the haves and the have-nots as well as the educated and the uneducated. Travels across the semi-urban...

A recent statistical study by Indian researchers suggest that the MNREGA program in rural Andhra Pradesh might be having a positive effect on school enrolment and grades by improving the bargaining power of women within their household, as a consequence of earning wages in the rural job security program. The study is based on data from rural households in 5 districts in Andhra Pradesh and comprised of 3006 children, comparing...