-The Hindu Social audits of the mid-day meal scheme by parents can ensure that the world's largest intervention against hunger that also helps keep children in school need not suffer setbacks like the Bihar tragedy This week, 23 children lost their lives after having a mid-day meal served at a school in Bihar's Saran district. Preliminary reports suggest that the school lacked a storage facility for foodgrain which led to contamination and...

-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

-The Business Standard Bihar's model of health care through mobile phones is finding many takers Many things may be going wrong in India, but the one thing that has gone right is the reach of the mobile phone. It has bridged the divide between the rural and the urban areas, the rich and the poor. Governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and phone companies are realising the potential of the mobile phone as a tool...

-The Indian Express Kolkata: Nearly 15 months after she was allegedly raped by five men after she stepped out of a city hotel and accepted a lift in their car, the 38-year-old woman known as the Park Street rape victim has decided to make her identity public. "I have been a rape victim, a rape survivor. Why should I be ashamed and hide my face? The criminals who raped me should hide...