-The Hindu   The Dakshina Kannada Zilla Panchayat has launched an ambitious project to improve personal hygiene among women with the launch of a project to manufacture low-cost sanitary napkins. Ten members of the Isiri Self-Help Group (SHG) at Layla village of Belthangady taluk were TRAIned by an NGO to manufacture sanitary napkins with cotton made from wood pulp. The sanitary napkins were less than half an inch thick and were called Safety...

The Jharkhand state MGNREGA council has increased the honorarium to nearly 6,000 contract employees working for implementation of the central scheme, putting an additional burden of over Rs 1 crore on the state exchequer. However, the government said the extra load would be borne by the central share of funds. The proposal of the rural development department was approved by the state council in its third meeting here on Tuesday. The...

Of late, there has been a debate on whether public programmes such as school education, scholarships, health-care delivery and access to microcredit can be targeted at beneficiaries based on religion; some consider this ‘unconstitutional' and argue that it amounts to discrimination. I highlight the constitutional provisions and argue that there is nothing in the Constitution which bars identification of beneficiaries based on religion. Religious identity is listed on a par...

The multinational refuses to be sensitive to the grievances of its Indian workforce, which generates the greater proportion of the company's profits. The workers of the Maruti Suzuki India Limited's (MSIL) plant in Haryana's Manesar have been agitating since August-end against the dismissal and suspension of more than 60 of their colleagues and the management's insistence on their signing a ‘good conduct bond' before they are allowed to enter the plant....

-PTI   The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is probing several high-profile corruption cases, had demanded only partial exemption from the ambit of the RTI Act as per its initial proposal but later pressed for a blanket cover which was approved by the government this year. The file notings provided by the Department of Personnel and TRAIning, under RTI Act, show that in 2007, Committee of Secretaries had rejected the demand of...