Number of centres to be frozen There are nearly 2,300 PHCs in the State Freezing the number will help improve the PHCs Ten of the 30 districts in the State have very poor healthcare services while an equal number of districts have good facilities. Given the need to streamline the system, the State Government has decided to freeze the number of Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and utilise the available funds for improving the...

The big newspapers are Indian, as much as they are ethnic or regional in character. Their choice of news reflects the upward mobility of middle class India. This report is based on a recently concluded survey of what newspapers covered over a two month period in late 2010. Our study took ten newspapers in five states: Hindustan Times (Delhi), Dainik Jagran (Delhi), Telegraph, Ananda Bazar Patrika, Deccan Chronicle, Dinathanti, the Hindu...

The government’s programme to usher in a green revolution in West Bengal, Assam, Orissa, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh will see a key change in the next financial year. The allocation of funds, which was more skewed towards West Bengal so far, will now shift towards eastern Uttar Pradesh, according to guidelines framed for implementing the scheme. Officials said this was largely because a new component of wheat had been...

About four years after its first survey on the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Orissa's hinterlands that showed large-scale defalcation of money, the Delhi-based NGO Centre for Environment and Food Security today in its second performance audit revealed that 67 per cent of very poor Dalit and tribal households in Orissa and UP did not get even a single day of the NREGS employment during previous...

Amid technical and infrastructural constraints, Maharashtra has rolled out 1.2 million Aadhaars, but the beneficiaries have been able to make little use of these numbers Ashok Bhil, a 25-year-old graduate from Navalpur, 7 Km from Tembhli, is disappointed with the way the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is rolling out Aadhaar in Maharashtra. Last September, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government chose Tembhli, a small village in the predominantly tribal Nandurbar...