-IANS   A senior police officer was on Friday night allegedly manhandled and forcibly dumped into a mental asylum after he took on Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati by alleging massive corruption in the state. IPS officer Devendra Dutt Mishra, a DIG in the Uttar Pradesh Fire Service Department who is due to retire in 2 years, had threatened to make public files containing evidence of the massive embezzlement of funds in the...

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet.  But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...

A retired IPS officer in Bihar JK Sinha has set up a free English-medium residential school to educate 200 young Musahar boys. It's a big step for the tribe which is one of the state's most backward communities. Every morning, the national anthem instills pride and courage in 120 inmates of the residential school. One of the students Pankaj said, "This school gives us all the basic amenities that a...

The United Nations unveiled its 22nd annual Human Development Report on Wednesday, with grave warnings that unless countries take action against climate change and implement sustainable solutions, progress in human development will be in serious jeopardy. Trends over the past 40 years indicate extraordinary progress in health and education in some of the world's poorest countries, and if those trends continue, by 2050, most countries will have achieved or surpassed standards...

While gender equality ratios have improved in 85 percent of countries over the past six years, economic participation and political empowerment for women has failed to match the steady progress of health and education, says a new report by the World Economic Forum. The report, "Global Gender Gap", compiled by Ricardo Hausmann from Harvard University, Laura Tyson from University of California, Berkeley and Saadia Zahidi from the World Economic Forum, illustrates...