Contaminated water sources and the virtual absence of health care claim dozens of lives in the State, now in the grip of cholera. COME monsoon and the backward regions of Orissa are in the grip of water-borne diseases. This year too has been no different. According to official figures, 150 people had died of cholera and diarrhoea in the State as on September 15. Unofficial reports put the toll at more...

Two days after the government scrapped a bauxite mining project in Orissa, Rahul Gandhi visited Niyamgiri, the ground zero of the anti-mine protests and told tribals that he was their sipahi in Delhi. Around the same time, farmers in Uttar Pradesh said they wouldn’t sell their land at the rates the government was offering. India is growing fast, but hassles over the acquisition of land are going to be the...

Chief minister Naveen Patnaik on Sunday said that the state government is committed to achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It has prepared the District Human Development Reports on the basis of MDGs and they will be replicated in all districts soon, he said. Gracing the concluding session of the programme of the Stand up and Take Action (SUTA) to end poverty by 2015, Patnaik reiterated that poverty has been reduced...

The green hills -- those that once used to soothe the entire region through the stilly silence, and fill it with the great wonder of multitudinousness -- have suddenly turned into a valley of death. First Diarrhea and then Cholera, the quiet bosom of the picturesque Raygada district is today torn by the screams of pain and loss of lives. People are dying like flies and hundreds are lying on...

A three-member central team reached the cholera-hit Rayagada district today to review measures being taken by the authorities to check the epidemic. The team visited Kalayansinghpur, the worst-affected block of the district. More cases of cholera deaths were also reported from across the district. While the official death toll stood at 40, unofficial sources claimed that the epidemic had already claimed more than 75 lives in Rayagada district alone. The number...