-The Times of India VARANASI: In an extremely cold and shivering night, a man with torn clothes was eating something picked up from a dustbin at platform number 4 of Charbagh railway station of Lucknow. Some passenger may have thrown the leftover eatable. But, finding it insufficient to satiate his hunger the man started looking for some more stuff in other dustbins at the platform. When this correspondent tried to interact with...

-Outlook Lucknow: Taking note of media reports and state-level reviews over the delay in clearance of wages under the rural job scheme, Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has written a letter to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav urging him to ensure prompt payments. The letter, dated January 8, states that it has been mentioned in the law that payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) have...

-The Times of India Lucknow: The World Bank has approved a $500 million credit for the rural water supply and sanitation (RWSS) project to improve piped water supply and sanitation services through decentralized delivery systems in the states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. According to Census 2011 data, only 31% of the 167 million rural households in India have access to tap water and domestic toilets. About 67% of the...

-Newsclick.in With sixty percent children malnourished in the state, the implementation of the Integrated Child Development Services, the largest scheme to provide nutrition to children in the country, is nothing but a sham. Sitting outside her semi-pucca house in Bilgram block, Kasturi says, "My children get five fistful of panjiri once a month from the Aanganwadi Centre." Thirty-three year-old Kasturi has never, in her parents' village or her in-law's village seen an...

-The Times of India Lucknow: Union minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday shot off another letter to the Akhilesh Yadav government, accusing it of having failed to spend money given under the central schemes. This is Jairam's sixth dispatch to the SP government since it came to power in March, 2012. The letter to the chief minister focuses on the implementation of the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP), a centrally-funded...