Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN) started in 1995 as an informal network of NGOs to influence the Watershed Development Program of Government being implemented in the drought prone areas for economic improvement of the poor, women and marginalized sections of the rural India. Carving out a creative space for NGOs within the government program, capacity building of various stakeholders, influencing policy and capacitating and empowering the rural community...

-The Hindu   The rising tide of female voters in 2014 might have had a concrete impact on the outcome of these elections, data shows. Despite the Election Commission's efforts to get more women registered to vote, the number of female electors (those registered to vote) grew much slower than the number of male electors, between 2009 and 2014, The Hindu found. Men registered to vote outnumber women by over 40 million, giving...

-The Economic Times   NEW DELHI: The new NDA government under Narendra Modi is set to embark on an ambitious multi-million dollar sanitation project that seeks to clean up around 1,000 Indian towns besides eliminating manual scavenging as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi whose 150th birth anniversary will be celebrated in 2019. Tentatively named the 'Mahatma Gandhi Clean India Programme', the project will start from three cities in Uttar Pradesh, including Modi's Lok...

-ANI New Delhi/ Cuttack: Farmers in India's eastern region, prone for flash floods, are now shifting to flood-tolerant variety of rice, developed by Manila-based International Rice Research Institute, IRRI. The variety - Swarna-SUB1, is bread from a popular Indian variety of rice Swarna by upgrading it with SUB1, the gene for flood tolerance. Swarna was developed by Andhra Pradesh Agriculture University. The new variety, according to a report in the Indian Science Journal...

-IPS News   ATTAPPADI, India, May 4 2014 (IPS) - The death of a 10-day-old girl last November in the Attappadi tribal belt of Kerala, one of India's best performing states in terms of human development indices, shows how the country's battle against child mortality is far from won. The infant's mother, Saraswathy, a 20-year-old from the Kurumba tribe, was admitted to a government hospital, and delivered the next day. At 1.8 kg,...