HETA, India – At the entrance to this village in India’s eastern state of jharkhand, a large pond glistened under the bright autumn sun. Yellow and blue lilies surrounded it. A tailor was stitching clothes outside his shop while a few boys nearby were playing carrom on the lid of a rusted oil barrel. It was a tranquil, rustic setting – a candidate for a landscape painting, it seemed. But it...

The Justice MB Shah Committee, appointed by the Central Government to probe illegal mining of iron ore and manganese across the country met with a poor response in Ranchi, on the first day of the two-day public hearing. jharkhand, accounts for a fourth of the country's iron ore. The few journalists covering the event outnumbered the public, and the former judge had to beseech the few attendees to come forward to...

-IANS As many as 7,563 rape cases were reported in jharkhand during the ten-year period since the formation of the state in November 2000, a local NGO jharkhand Human Rights Movement (JHRM) has reported. In a report titled "jharkhand Human Rights Report 2001-2010", the human rights group said women in the state were easy prey to crimes like rape, witchcraft and dowry. The report, released here in the form of a book,...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

Less than two in 10 women in India received medical attention by a qualified professional in 2010 while delivering at home. Contrary to popular belief, fewer women in urban India received medical attention while delivering at home than rural India - 10.8% against 16.2%. Nearly 1 in 4 births overall were attended by "untrained functionaries" - varying from as high as 53.5% in jharkhand to as low as 0.2% in...