-DNA The percentage of people living below the poverty line in Karnataka has come down by 9.7% in the estimate of poverty for 2009-10, released by the Planning Commission on Monday. In 2004-05, the percentage of people living below poverty line was 33.3%. In 2009-10, it was 23.6%. Apart from Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, sikkim, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand also recorded a decline of about 10 percentage points. In Karnataka,...

The latest round of data on the 2011 Census shows that the country is exhibiting distinct signs of trading up as material living conditions improve for large sections of the population. Although this aggregate picture is not uniform across the country, analysts believe that the upward material mobility in society is creating the basis of a new consumer boom in the economy—serving up a perfect backdrop ahead of the presentation of...

In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...

-IANS Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh on Friday expressed concern that the government's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) is being seen as a "token sanitation campaign" and rued that women were demanding mobile phones but not toilets.  "Women demand mobile phones, they are not demanding toilets... Sanitation is the much more difficult issue," Ramesh said at the launch of Asia-Pacific Regional MDGs (Millenium Development Goals) Report 2011-12.  Ramesh said women's self-help groups (SHGs) should...

-Eastern Panorama   It’s been almost two months since a 6.9 magnitude earthquake left the Himalayan state of sikkim devastated. Nine families of Ralak village in Tingchim Mangshilla Gram Panchayat in the North District of sikkim are still living in make shift relief camps with the mothers cuddling their children under blankets to give them comfort and warmth in the cold November nights. As snow has already covered the mountains visible from...