-The Indian Express Urban Development Minister Kamal Nath has said that the Delhi Development Authority will build one lakh houses for the economically weaker sections (EWS) every year. He made this announcement at a meeting of the consultative committee attached to the Ministry of Urban Development. He said around 40 lakh people in Delhi live in unauthorised colonies and to prevent further growth of slum clusters, the government regularised 917 unauthorised colonies this...

-The Economic Times The government plans to revive cultivation of crops that make Punjab's iconic "makki ki roti and sarson ka saag" -- maize and mustard -- along with horticulture and fodder to breathe life into the stressed soil and the rapidly depleting water table in the green-revolution state. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is pushing hard for crop diversification in Punjab and has appointed an inter-ministerial panel on crop diversification led by Agriculture...

-The Business Standard For some people, travelling by train to their village 1,400 km away is a journey through hell. These are people who travel unreserved. Their suffering is all the more traumatic for being symbolic of the apathy of those who run the trains and the country. Saraswati Mondal, an illiterate domestic worker in Delhi, going to Murshidabad by Kalka Mail goes to New Delhi station, walks into a crowd of...

-The Hindu Rajouri /Janjgir Champa: Exactly a year ago last February, 78 migrants working in bonded debt in brick kilns in Jammu and Kashmir made a desperate bid to start a new life. Sahodara Bai, who had worked at the kiln with her husband and eight children for 25 years, returned from a rare visit to her village in the plains in Chhattisgarh with a pamphlet. “The parchaa (pamphlet) had the name...

-The Times of India HARRAI: The Khairwar tribe in this remote village of Madhya Pradesh is on the verge of extinction because of the tribe members' inability to conceive. In the past five decades, villagers say, there has been only one birth in the tribe. And that child too -- born in 2011 -- died within a year. Why are the members of this community not able to have children? Locals attribute...