Due to the annual decline in under-5 mortality rate by almost 7% during 2008-13, the Government is hopeful of India attaining the target 5 of Millennium Development Goal-4 i.e. reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the U5MR. This has been revealed in a press release on checking child mortality rate by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, dated 28 April, 2015.   However, experts think that this will be...

-The Hindu Govt. accused of backtracking on promise of loan waiver Mumbai: Farmers in Maharashtra are using the phrase bure din (bad days) to describe their condition. Akshay Tale last spoke to his close friend Neelesh Walke at around 2.45 p.m. on December 30 last year. Neelesh, who faced a Rs. 2 lakh debt, seemed anxious but showed no signs that he was considering any extreme step. At around 4 p.m., Neelesh, barely 23,...

-The Hindu “Temblor might occur tomorrow, or 50 years later, but it will hit the State” Dehradun: In the wake of the recent Nepal earthquake, the possibility of a temblor of magnitude 8 striking Uttarakhand has come up for discussion. A research article, “Geomorphology reveals active décollement geometry in the central Himalayan seismic gap”, says a 700-km-long “central seismic gap” on the Himalayan front had not ruptured in a major earthquake in 200-500...

-Hindustan Times Sheopur: Raju Adivasi is young, a postgraduate in Hindi literature and is, without doubt, the most qualified among the ancient Saharia tribespeople of Sheopur. They, as tribe, are entitled to walk in and walk out with any government job matching their qualification without interview. But he has been jobless for the past 10 months after the Centre stopped funds to a scheme that had gave him job in a government...

-Business Standard R Nagaraj, professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), had disputed the Central Statistics Office (CSO) methodology on non-financial private corporate sector, which is a segment in the new GDP data. His criticism was mainly on the ground that CSO altered the methodology in 2015 from what was agreed on by a sub-committee, in which Nagaraj was a non-official member, in 2014. CSO gave a rejoinder...