-The World Bank About 7.8 million rural people are expected to directly benefit from the project NEW DELHI: The government of India and the World Bank today signed a $500 million credit agreement to improve piped water supply and sanitation services through decentralized delivery systems in the states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. The credit agreement for the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation (RWSS) Project for Low Income States was signed...

-PTI The year 2012 saw a total of 39,512 cases registered under the SC/ST Act while the conviction rate in those stood at a dismal 23.8 per cent, Parliament was told. Sharing the data on cases under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment added that 83.1 per cent of these cases were pending in courts. According to the report, 10 states...

-Deccan Herald Instead of reducing the usage, molecular breeders are conveniently dovetailing pesticides tolerance into GM crop varieties. It's a strange paradox. While the demand for organic food is rising unequivocally in the rich and developed countries as well as in the major developing countries, the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture is also growing at a phenomenal pace. The organic food industry in the US is relatively new. At a time when...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Satyendra Dubey, Amit Jethwa, Ram Thakur, Shimbhu Bishnoi, Satish Shetty, Lalit Mehta, Lingaraju, Nandi Singh - some of the names ring a bell, others don't. Some became primetime news, others were buried in barely noticeable corners of newspapers. But they all belong to the select tribe of whistleblowers killed in line of duty for daring to expose corruption. On Monday, their friends and relatives came from...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: With every passing day, the current parliamentary session - which is the last one before the Lok Sabha election - seems less and less likely to pass the six corruption-related Bills promised by Rahul Gandhi. In a bid to salvage the situation, Aruna Roy's group has zeroed in two of those six Bills, saying that they were "non-controversial" and "necessary complements" to the much touted...