-The Indian Express Human Development Report: Spending 4% of GDP can ensure social security net. India may have little to feel proud about in the findings of UNDP's Human Development Report for 2014, but the good news is that with ongoing rural employment and school education programmes and some serious discussions on universal healthcare over the last couple of years, it is moving in the right direction. The report gives a six-point...

-Economic and Political Weekly The processes of economic restructuring during the last two decades have witnessed a massive spurt of opportunities in the labour market which have, withholding the periodic shifts, facilitated women's workforce participation. Although the relationship between economic restructuring and occupational/ industrial diversities is fraught with ambiguities, it may generally be hypothesised that such enhanced openings would contribute towards the reduction in the often observed gendered segregation of labour...

-The Hindu The Centre has launched a major war against Japanese encephalitis which claims hundreds of young lives and causes high morbidity among children in several States across the country during monsoon. Within weeks of taking over, Union Health and Family welfare Minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan said that his priority would be to ensure 100 per cent immunisation against the killer disease. Expressing extreme distress over the "runaway conquest of encephalitis," Dr Harsh...

-The Times of India Improvement in human development measures has slowed down in the past few years, according to the 2014 Human Development Report (HDR) released on 24 July in Tokyo. The human development index (HDI), a measure derived from life expectancy, education levels and incomes, barely grew from 0.700 in 2012 to 0.702 in 2013. Even that small improvement could be at risk of getting reversed given the bleak picture of...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Sanitation projects to reduce open defecation, increasing green cover and emphasis on creating assets form the crux of the Narendra Modi-led government's blueprint for redeploying UPA's flagship social sector programme - the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or MGNREGA. Top officials aware of the government's re-orientation roadmap for the rural employment guarantee scheme, being steered by rural development minister Nitin Gadkari, told ET that assessment...