-The Hindustan Times Ahead of the 2014 polls, the UPA government is planning to launch a Rs. 978-crore skill enhancement programme for girls, 14 years or older, from the Muslim community. The proposal is likely to come up for cabinet approval soon. Called "Hunar", which means "skill", the scheme aims at imparting skills training to nearly 9.2 lakh Muslim girls across India. The government has proposed to run the programme in...

-The Times of India Ashok Khemka has become famous as a much-transferred IAS officer, but he is far from being the only one to have been shunted ever so often. An analysis of the executive record (ER) sheets of thousands of IAS officers currently in service reveals that frequent transfers are depressingly common. It shows that about two-thirds of the officers have had average tenures of 18 months or less. The analysis...

-World Resources Institute India struggles with water scarcity, a problem that poses especially huge implications for the country's food security and rural livelihoods. The country has long-battled its scarcity issues through Watershed Development, a participatory approach to improve water management through afforestation and reforestation, sustainable land management, soil and water conservation, water-harvesting infrastructure, and social interventions. But while watershed development has been employed in communities throughout India, its potential long-term costs...

-Survival International Anthropologist Dr. Felix Padel works with the tribes of Odisha in eastern India, including the Dongria Kondh, for whom Survival International has campaigned for 10 years. Felix is the great great grandson of Charles Darwin and lives in a remote village in Odisha. In this interview, he talks to Survival about the Dongria Kondh's relationship to their mountains, their heroic struggle against Vedanta, Darwin's evolution theory and the experience...

-The Times of India Gujarat's much-touted Chiranjeevi Yojana, launched in 2006 to reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in BPL households, has not had any significant impact, says a new study by Duke University. The programme, which subsidizes the cost of delivery at designated private sector hospitals, has not led to increased probability of institutional child-delivery. Also, analyses of household expenditure of women who used the subsidized delivery scheme in private hospitals...