-The Hindustan Times The country is ostensibly in the throes of a great social movement for sanitation. Gandhi's name is evoked, Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads from the front, ministers lift brooms for cameras, and officers, college and school children take oaths against littering and to clean their surroundings. Earlier the PM pledges in his Independence Day speech toilets for girls and boys in all schools. It appears that the squalor of...

-The Hindu Business Line The number of people commuting between rural and urban areas and across geographies has risen dramatically In the last couple of decades, the number of people commuting between rural and urban areas on a daily basis has seen an explosive growth. This includes unskilled workers without a fixed place of work. According to the National Sample Survey Organisation, between 1993-94 and 2009-10, India saw a nearly fourfold increase (from...

-The Hindu The Odisha government has made the right announcements to improve the plight of migrant workers, but a lot more needs to be done In December 2013, a labourer chopped off the palms of two migrant workers from western Odisha. He had paid them an advance for working in the brick kilns of Hyderabad and did not take kindly to their arguing with him about the payment and place of work....

-Mid-Day.com Ganpati travellers' plans went awry as 14 Trains on Konkan Railway were cancelled, after seven wagons of a goods train carrying food grain derailed near Karanjadi railway station in Mahad taluka, Raigad district, yesterday Hundreds of tonnes of food grains were strewn across the tracks on Konkan Railway, after a goods train carrying them derailed near Karanjadi railway station early in the morning yesterday. Passengers travelling to their native places in the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre has tall plans of making India open defecation-free by 2019 and has asked states to ensure toilets for all, but sanitation experts are sceptical whether so much can be done in five years. Pankaj Jain, the drinking water and sanitation secretary, has written to chief secretaries of all states that the Modi regime is committed to ringing in a "Swachh Bharat" by 2019, which marks...