Sixty per cent of hospitals in rural Maharashtra don’t have an obstetrician or gynaecologist, 85 per cent are not equipped to conduct caesarean sections and about 90 per cent don’t have blood storage facilities. These are just some of the several shocking findings of the third District Level Household Survey (DLHS), a health survey commissioned by the Union Health Ministry and conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai....

The best advertisement is that which the public pays to receive. So the UPA government will turn the rural job scheme into a diploma course in its universities, teaching students about the pro-poor programme’s achievements against a small fee. The one-year course, which starts from the 2011-12 academic year, will also impart education in the nitty-gritty of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme’s implementation. Fittingly, at the end of it the...

Suicide notes in Vidarbha are at times addressed to the Prime Minister, the desperate last cries of voices that went unheeded when alive. Seeking authenticity for his letter to the Prime Minister and the President, Ramachandra Raut composed it with care on Rs.100 non-judicial stamp paper. Then he added a few more addressees, including his village sarpanch and the police, in the hope that it got home someplace. Then he...

Until two years ago, Vimla had never even considered stepping out of her house for work. Women in her part of the world didn’t work. Now, she doesn’t just work, but also operates a bank account, participates in household decisions, and is learning two of the Rs (reading and writing). The difference is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) that was launched in Vimla’s village in 2008....

Madvi Madka owns 4ha of land in Chingavaram in the Sukum block in central India. The district in which the block is located has become infamous after 6 April, killing of 76 policemen by the Maoists. This is the ground zero of the war between the Indian state and the Maoists, and Madka, who owns 4ha of land—often left fallow because there wasn’t enough water for irrigation—here used to make...