The Digital India Mission, launched by the NDA government, aims to connect 2.5 lakh village panchayats with high speed broadband internet by December, 2016 so that citizens can access online services. However, available facts reveal that this is a difficult task to be accomplished. In rural areas, among the youth aged 14-29 about 82 percent do not know how to operate a computer. In urban areas, nearly 51 percent of youth...

-The Indian Express 4.56 lakh girls were missing on average every year for the period 2001-12. The reason is sex-selective abortions, which though declining in number, continues in the country. Pune: Around 2.9 lakh girls were missing at birth due to sex selection in 2012, lower than the annual average of 3.3 lakh for the period 2007-12, according to data compiled under the Sample Registration System (SRS) and released by the...

-The Hindu Business Line Discussions are on with insurance companies: official New Delhi: The government is considering the launch of a universal health insurance product, a government official said, adding that the Department of Financial Services has already held discussions with insurance companies for the launch of such a product. The government is also considering ways to incentivise providers to encourage good health rather than hospitalisation. “So far, health schemes are pushing for hospitalisation...

-Economic and Political Weekly While insufficient sanitation facilities often get represented in statistics and are reported in the literature on urban infrastructure planning and contested urban spaces, what is often left out is the everyday practice and experience of going to dysfunctional toilets, particularly by women. By analysing the practices and problems associated with toilet use from a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to situate the issue in the everyday lives...

-The Times of India Believe it or not, the murder rate in India in the past few years has been at its lowest level since the 1960s. Even the absolute number of murders in 2014 was lower than in 1992, the year when the murder rate (number of murders per lakh of Population) was at its highest. The counter-intuitive fact emerges from an analysis of data from the National Crime Records Bureau's...