-The Hindustan Times The government plans to put up coal mines for bidding by private steel, power and cement companies and introduce changes in the law to enable commercial mining in the future, signalling its intent to fully open the sector to private players. The new auction-based system will replace the earlier controversial policy of allotting coal blocks based on recommendations of a panel of bureaucrats, which the Supreme Court had struck...

-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...

-PTI In August last year, Parliament was informed that Maharashtra had witnessed 37 farmer suicides due to agrarian reasons The number of farmer suicides in Maharashtra is higher compared to other states in the country, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said today. "As compared to other states, farmers suicides are maximum in Maharashtra," Singh said without disclosing the details, on the sidelines of a book launch here. Asked about the reasons for growing...

-eSocialSciences.org The report is an outcome of a coordinated civil society effort led by CommonHealth, a national level coalition working on maternal-neonatal health and safe abortion. India has been reporting a steady decline in the country's maternal mortality ratio (MMR) over the last few years. It is in this context that several civil society organizations in the country came together in 2012 under an initiative led by CommonHealth called Dead...

-Deccan Chronicle Under the stewardship of Union rural development minister Nitin Gadkari, things are looking far from good for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the 2005 law passed with cross-party support under UPA-1 that came to be hailed as the world's largest rural job guarantee scheme although, at home, some fair criticisms were also levelled at the way the project worked on the ground. The critics pointed to...