Directs Centre to submit detailed report on project cost and land acquisition The ambitious river linking project, connecting rivers of peninsular India with  Himalayan rivers through canals, has hit a roadblock after the Supreme Court's observation that the project would burden the Union government because of escalating costs. While environmentalists and activists have welcomed the order seeking detailed report on the project's cost, the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) has commenced...

Maharashtra has been struggling with a declining child sex ratio and is ranked among the five worst states in the country. The reasons are the same as elsewhere: preference for a male child. But in a shocking indicator of how extreme this desire is and how deep-rooted the bias against the girl child can get, scores of families across Maharashtra have simply named their daughters ‘Nakushi’ or ‘Nakusha’—meaning ‘unwanted’ in...

Pilot survey under Project Dipankar in four prosperous districts shows 87 per cent class I students of government schools are undernourished Eighty-seven per cent school children in four districts of West Bengal are undernourished right at the entry level. The shocking numbers are from the yet unpublished report of Project Dipankar, a child tracking system initiated by the department of school education in the state. The project tracks the educational performance...

“That space on the wall, that is the cradle, the first stop to the Unique Home,” says a playful four-year-old girl pointing to a shelf built into the boundary wall of the home. An alarm is set off when a newborn girl is placed there, marking the beginning of celebrations on the arrival of yet another addition to Parkash Kaur's Unique Home at Jalandhar in Punjab. Mother of 60 adopted girls,...

At a time that land in urban centres, especially in the big metropolitan cities, is at a premium, a Working Group of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has suggested that, as far as possible, slum dwellers should be resettled at the spot where they are currently living, rather than displacing them, so that they continue to remain close to their places of work. NAC sources said the Working...