-The Hindu   Apart from ensuring the immediate appointment of 18,000 panchayat development officers and as many junior engineers, the Centre has drawn up a blueprint to provide jobs to three-lakh youth in the 60 left wing extremist affected districts in the country. Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, in his consolidated note for the approval of the Empowered Group of Secretaries for the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) under Planning Commission member...

Despite Gujarat's impressive growth rate, the state trails less developed ones like Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Assam when it comes to malnutition. A new report places Gujarat at the thirteenth position on a list of states based on hunger. “Among the industrial high per capita income states, Gujarat (69.7 per cent children up to age 5 anaemic and 44.6 per cent malnourished) fares the worst in terms of overall...

Vilas Bhagwan Pote grins as he recalls his election as sarpanch of Ralegan Siddhi, Anna Hazare’s village in Ahmednagar district, 11 years ago. “I was the traitor, the bad guy,” he jokes. “I openly defied Anna because I felt he was wrong.” Pote, a Dalit charmakar (cobbler) then in his 30s, had been unhappy as the 2000 panchayat polls drew close. As always, Anna had nominated a new executive body for the...

Today is the ''International Day for the Eradication of Poverty'', so it an appropriate day to note how necessary it still is to emphasise this concern among Indian policy makers. Sadly, lack of official awareness is evident in all sorts of recent policy measures, for example in the cynicism of increasing oil prices that feed into all other prices with cascading effects, even when inflation has already imposed huge burdens on...

Narendra Modi’s Gujarat is the only developed state in the country where the percentage of malnourished children is higher than the national average, a government report released today said. Gujarat has 44.6 per cent underweight children, compared to the country’s average of nearly 42 per cent. Six other states have a higher-than-average proportion of malnourished children but all of these are poor — Madhya Pradesh (60 per cent), followed by Jharkhand (56.5),...