-The Times of India PATNA: At least 400 women and adolescent girls in Bihar would have escaped rape in 2012 had the state government provided toilets to all the households in the state under the Centre-sponsored Total Sanitation Scheme (TSC), now christened Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA). That's official - sort of. According to police records, rape cases averaged 980-odd every year in Bihar between 2006 and 2011. In the year just gone...

-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...

Araria, Patna: The Bihar government today suspended Raniganj (Araria) Circle Officer Ramvilas Jha, who is facing a probe for engaging middlemen and his relatives to purchase land plots at Kajra and Bistoria from farmers at dirt cheap rates and selling the same to the government at three to four times the price for its Mahadalit land scheme. Revenue and land reform department joint secretary Vijay Kumar Singh said the vigilance department...

Islamapur, Nalanda: One family builds a house that has no walls, no doors, just a bizarre semi-circular curved strip buried in the sand; another builds a thatched house with no approach road so everyone has to sleep by the side of the highway and cook in the open. And 70 other families don’t know what to do because all the plots they got last November — to build their homes...

Araria, Bihar: Exactly a year ago, just before the rains, Kumiya Devi got her three-decimal (1,306.8-square foot) plot at Kajra in Araria district under the Mahadalit Vikas Yojana, the Nitish Kumar government’s showpiece scheme to distribute land to landless Dalits.   Before she could build her home, a seasonal stream flooded the plot and her 10-year-old son Aklu drowned in it while going to school. Reason: there was no approach road to...