Nearly 63 years after Independence, a village situated on a hillock near Indore, got its first ever electricity connection. Koparwel, a tiny village with 20 households, broke into jubilation with the lighting of a bulb in one of its huts this Friday. Ambaram is the first villager to get the electricity connection. No sooner was his house brightened by a CFL bulb, villagers worshipped the instrument, distributed "prasad" and burst firecrackers. "It is a...

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government believed in inclusive growth and wanted to ensure that the benefits of growth reached every individual across the country, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said here on Saturday. Over the past six-and-a-half years, the UPA government had strived to ensure economic growth, provide employment to people and raise the resources required for implementing poverty alleviation programmes. “We recognise that growth is necessary for sustaining our programmes. At...

A charred piece of earth and some bits of bones are the only signs of a dastardly killing in the name of honour. No other evidence remains of the spine-chilling crime to mar the rustic charm of Maalaipatti village, perched among the green mountains of the Western Ghats in Dindigul district. On July 28, 2008, a few days after being chained in a bathroom and treated like a rabid dog...

Women from minority communities have outnumbered men by a long way — 417 to 338 — in winning the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad national fellowships for research, prompting the government to drop plans for reservation. Launched this year to help minority community students in higher education, this scheme offers integrated five-year fellowships in the form of financial assistance to pursue degrees such as MPhil and PhD. Girls from all communities except Buddhists...

Thousands of poor village Youths can now hope to become BPO workers with Ignou training. The Indira Gandhi National Open University will train an estimated 45,000 rural Youths from below-poverty-line (BPL) families in the areas of telecommunications, business process outsourcing (BPO) and security. It will also teach them soft skills — such as basic spoken English and etiquette — to make easy their shift from agrarian backgrounds to an industry environment. At the...