While the country has made progress in reducing poverty, it has lagged behind in improving sanitation India has made headway in reducing poverty and giving access to drinking water for much of its population, but has lagged behind in improving sanitation, food security, maternal mortality and gender equity standards, putting it at risk of missing key targets, said the Millennium Development Goals Report 2012 released on Monday. According to the report, which...

-Down to Earth As corruption hijacks procurement centres in Bundelkhand, farmers prefer suicide to a debt trap. Richard Mahapatra reports from Uttar Pradesh with photographer Sayantoni Palchoudhuri A fatal paradox strikes Bundelkhand in the face—an overflowing wheat stock yet an overwhelming number of farmer suicides. Farmers here dread the government wheat procurement centre and the post-mortem house. In Orai, a small town in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh, the two are...

Punjab’s agricultural sector grew at 1.6 per cent during the 11th Plan against the national average of 3.41 per cent. The growth is tardy owing to near saturation in productivity. The rural debts in Punjab are estimated to be Rs 35,000 crore. The number of indebted rural households in Punjab is 66 per cent, third highest in the country after Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The Government of India’s debt...

-PTI India’s monsoon, vital for Asia’s third-largest economy, has been 22% deficient till June 26, official data showed, adding to the government’s worries and prompting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to consult key aides on measures to tone up the economy on Wednesday. In a revised forecast, the Met department predicted the rains would be 96% of the long-term average, lower than its April forecast of 99%. Rainfall is considered normal if...

-The Economic Times Heaps of dusty files continue to grow in government buildings and sensitive papers are mysteriously lost, leaked or dramatically reduced to ashes in fires while the six-year-old plan to modernise and digitise governance remains tied up in what it should eliminate - red tape. The latest casualty was the Union home ministry, where a fire was reported on Sunday, days after a blaze engulfed Mumbai's Mantralaya, killing people and...