-The Telegraph The finance ministry has decided to shave Rs 3,000 crore, or about nine per cent, off the rural job guarantee scheme's budget allocation, government sources told The Telegraph. The move comes at a time the NDA government has been trying to assuage the fears of the Opposition and social activists that it plans to dilute the programme, introduced by the UPA government. This year's budget allocation for the programme was Rs...

-Outlook Kanpur: Indian Medical Association (IMA) will be providing free medical facilities and create awareness about good health practices in the villages adopted by it under the 'Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana'. "We have been directed by the IMA headquarters to adopt villages here which will be visited by a team of doctors once in a month. "Free medical facilities will be provided to the villagers and a cleanliness campaign will be launched to...

-The Hindu Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan have the highest proportion When the results to the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly elections came out two weeks ago, the northern State had produced twice the proportion of women legislators as its western counterpart. This isn't an exception; States with poor records on gender equality are consistently producing more female MLAs. Using Election Commission of India data, The Hindu found that as of today, Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Women empowerment may be the key slogan for every government since independence, but the findings of a government report show women still lag way behind men in having a say in decision making and in their participation in economic activity. The Central Statistics Office (CSO)'s publication "Women and Men in India 2014" found that women occupied seven out of 45 ministerial positions in the Narendra Modi's...

-The Hindustan Times To kick-start stalled development projects and remove investment bottlenecks, the government is expected to make changes to the land acquisition act during the winter session that opens on November 24. Dilution of the consent clause, restricting social impact assessment to large projects and giving states the powers to define "emergency" under "urgency clause" for acquiring land are some of the major amendments -- demanded by various states -- that...