-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Sanitation projects to reduce open defecation, increasing green cover and emphasis on creating assets form the crux of the Narendra Modi-led government's blueprint for redeploying UPA's flagship social sector programme - the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or MGNREGA. Top officials aware of the government's re-orientation roadmap for the rural employment guarantee scheme, being steered by rural development minister Nitin Gadkari, told ET that assessment...

-The Business Standard Of all the measures in the final Union Budget and Rail Budget for 2014-15, the micro-interventions that address food inflation by dismantling supply-side barriers are the most important. They carry added significance in a year when the monsoon has been deficient in a wide swathe of the western and northern parts of the country. The promise to bring down the hold of wholesale warlords in the Agricultural Produce Marketing...

-Down to Earth While northeast states such as Manipur and Nagaland have shown a sharp deterioration in child sex ratio, the skewed ratio has improved marginally in Punjab and Haryana The steadily declining child sex ratio in India has reached emergency proportions and urgent action must be taken to alleviate this crisis, warned a latest United Nations (UN) study. The report, released on Tuesday, has attributed much of the declining numbers to...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The monsoon's late revival has increased sowing of crops by 35% in the past week, but worries about agriculture persist as reservoir levels are low, while planting is still much lower than last year, and only slightly better than it was at this time in the drought year of 2009. The situation in water reservoirs was also worrisome as they were filled up to only 26%...

-The Hindu We need a National Authority on Hunger Elimination, with adequate funds and exclusive powers, administrative and financial Of the eight Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations, the first relates to eradicating poverty and extreme hunger, halving hunger by 2015. But most of the countries, including India, have not achieved tangible results on this front. With 2015 around the corner, the new government has a major task of addressing...