-The Telegraph New Delhi: Bihar is among the states with the poorest progress towards open-defecation-free (ODF) targets with some districts requiring 500 toilets every day to meet 2019 goals, according to a report from the non-government Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) released today. The report said Bihar, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand, accounting for 60 per cent of open defecation, would need to accelerate efforts for India to reach its ODF...

-The Indian Express A report, prepared by a Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) committee states that wages under the rural employment guarantee scheme were last aligned to minimum wages in 2009, and that “there is no compelling reason to align MGNREGA and states minimum wages again”. New Delhi: THE PANEL for revision of wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has recommended in its final report that there...

-The Indian Express Demonetisation: The “pipeline” demonetised collections, according to these officials, include banned notes lying with citizens in Nepal as deliberations between the RBI and the Nepal Rashtra Bank (NRB) for the exchange of such notes did not fructify. New Delhi: On a day when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released the data for collected demonetised currency, top RBI officials told The Indian Express that the figure could creep closer...

-The Indian Express The National Human Rights ComMISsion (NHRC) has issued a notice to the state government seeking its report within six weeks on the deaths of infants. Ranchi: Amid Congress raising the issue of deaths of infants in Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College Hospital (MGMMCH) in Jamshedpur, the District Judge on Tuesday visited the preMISes to carry out an inspection, taking suo motu cognisance on the issue. The National Human Rights...

-The Indian Express Section 375 of the IPC dealing with rape makes an exception for such instances within marriages and holds that “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under 15 years of age, is not rape” STATING THAT what “may appear to be marital rape” to a wife “may not appear so to others”, the central government took a stand against criminalising marital rape, in...