-The Times of India   Amid complaints from opposition Congress about corruption in Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) and other schemes, Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh will tour four districts of Madhya Pradesh to review implementation the centrally sponsored schemes.  Ramesh is expected to tour Sagar, Jabalpur, Mandla and Bhopal districts to review theMNREGS and implementation of other rural development schemes, particularly in the light of complaints of...

Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, in an article on left-wing extremism (“From Tirupati to Pashupati?” The Hindu , October 14, 2011), observed candidly: “It is not the naxals who have created the ground conditions ripe for their ideology — it is the singular failure of successive governments both in the States and the Centre.” There lay the main cause of the festering sore of naxalism, often characterised as left-wing...

In an outrageous act bound to dismay the medical ethics community, as many as 233 mentally ill patients in Indore were subjected to clinical trials to check the efficacy of various drugs, including 42 patients for Dapoxetine, a drug used to cure premature ejaculation. The trials were conducted at private clinics by doctors of the mental hospital attached to the Mahatma Gandhi Medical College, Indore, between January 2008 and October 2010....

An inconvenient truth? Or yet another case of shoddy data collection by state agencies? The government is scrambling to prove that it is the latter, after data on the UPA's flagship poverty alleviation programme shows that it may not be reaching its intended beneficiaries, those classified in official-speak as below the poverty line (BPL). A recent note circulated to all state departments by the rural development ministry revealed that only...

It began as an expose: the story of how Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh’s relatives allegedly received illegal mining contracts in Madhya Pradesh. Then, a tale of arm-twisting: government officials forced cable operators to pull out the news channel, Etv MP, that aired the story. Now, the story has a twist: Allegations of a failed “paid-news” deal. Officials claim that the channel carried the report—which Singh claims is baseless—after the government...