-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Soon, the last-mile connectivity in remote villages of the country's backward pockets may be provided by transport services run by women's Self Help Groups. The Centre is working on a scheme to provide interest-free loan to women's SHGs to enable them to buy vehicles and hire drivers. These vehicles will serve as public transport to villages not connected to the main town by any such service....

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A gram panchayat's success in reducing poverty will be judged by the number of households with over Rs 20,000 in savings bank accounts or percentage of families with Aadhaar-linked bank accounts. Or, by the percentage of its households which have availed over Rs 20,000 as bank credit. Interestingly, higher the number of households with bank loans for "diversified livelihood", the better the village would be assessed...

-Livemint.com All our solutions in agriculture, besides management issues, are going to come from science and technology, says Deepak Pental, innovator of GM mustard Last week, the environment ministry’s regulator, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), cleared the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) mustard, leaving it to the government to take a final call. If approved, it will be India’s first food crop developed using transgenic technology, 15 years after Bt...

When it comes to child under-nutrition, the proportion of stunted and underweight children below 5 years has reduced in India during the last ten years. However, a rising trend has been observed in the prevalence of wasting among children below 5 years between the last two rounds of National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The recently released data from NFHS-4 indicates that the proportion of under 5 year children who are...

-Scroll.in Instead of wages for a short period of time, the family running the project in Lanka village will create an asset for life. Mahavir Parhaiya’s household in the remote village of Lanka in Latehar district of Jharkhand is bustling with activity. They are busy working on setting up a mango plantation on what was once a barren plot near their house, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...