-The Economic Times Piyush Khanolkar, a 38-year-old farmer from the Marathwada district of Maharashtra, has just sold off 10 gm of gold which he had accrued over a period of last five years to a local jeweller. With good rains not in sight yet, he has been forced to sell off the gold to create a corpus to meet his family needs in the coming months if there is a crop failure. Prabhu...

-IANS The spectre of drought is looming large over Bihar, something that state officials have acknowledged. "If the monsoon fails the state in the first two weeks of July, the situation may be near drought," an official here said. Monsoon normally hits the state between June 12 and June 14. But this year, it was delayed by over a week. Soon after the rains began, they have been scanty. The state has received...

The government and the MCI dither on a proposed course to provide better primary health care in villages. On February 27, the Delhi High Court slapped contempt notices on the Union Health Secretary and the Chairperson of the Medical Council of India (MCI) for their non-compliance with its order of November 10, 2010, to initiate measures to introduce a “Bachelor of Rural Health Care (BRHC)” course of three and a half...

-The Telegraph Chhattisgarh police today admitted that the 18 victims of yesterday’s anti-Maoist operation included children and women but sparked fresh controversy by claiming they were all rebel cadres. The admission came after the bodies were laid out in front of a police station to facilitate identification — a routine procedure — and journalists took photographs. It was clear that several of the victims were children and at least one seemed a...

-PTI ITANAGAR: The flood situation in Arunachal Pradesh has become grim with reports on Tuesday of fresh areas being inundated by flood waters in several districts of the state leaving many families stranded.  The situation has turned for worse in Anjaw, Lohit, Changlang, Dibang Valley, East Siang and Upper Siang districts of the state with all the major rivers and their tributaries in spate and flowing above the red mark.  At Bordumsa under...