All eight of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are critical to development, but numbers four and five on child and maternal health are the real priority areas for this year. That was the main takeaway from a series of briefings with U.N., NGO and country officials in which IPS participated this week. When the MDGs were agreed in September 2000, they laid out a clear pathway to the often vague...
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Fewer hands to craft Durga idols in Kolkata, courtesy jobs scheme
The city's famous potters' colony of Kumartuli is facing an acute shortage of hands to sculpt Durga Puja idols. Behind this labour scarcity is an unlikely culprit - the rural jobs scheme which has induced hundreds to stay back in their villages. Costs of organising Durga Puja have gone up this year as more has to be shelled out on labour and raw material - in some cases jumping almost 50...
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KEY TRENDS • Maternal Mortality Ratio for India was 370 in 2000, 286 in 2005, 210 in 2010, 158 in 2015 and 145 in 2017. Therefore, the MMRatio for the country decreased by almost 61 percent between 2000 and 2017 *14 • As per the NSS 71st round, among rural females aged 5-29 years, the main reasons for dropping out/ discontinuance were: engagement in domestic activities, not interested in education, financial constraints and marriage. Among rural males aged...
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KEY TRENDS • Section 105 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which provides for excluding 13 Central legislation, including Land Acquisition (Mines) Act 1885, Atomic Energy Act, 1962, Railway Act 1989, National Highways Act 1956 and Metro Railways (Construction of Works) Act, 1978, from its purview, has been amended for payment of compensation with rigours $ • The amendments have now...
More »RTI rescues Rajasthan women from hunger, deprivation by Mamta Jaitly
In Vijaypura village, marginalised women, especially widows, have used the RTI tool to procure food grains under PDS and are living a healthy life. The movement, instigated by a young RTI activist, boasts of achieving the millennium goal of reducing hunger by half in the region. It was from the state of Rajasthan that the Right to Information (RTI) movement emerged as an idea that went on to capture national...
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