-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Noisy OB vans and an unending caravan of cars: on Friday afternoon, Kalkaji, a middle-class locality in south Delhi, was suddenly abuzz with activity and animation. It's barely an hour since the news flashed on TV screens. But everybody knows that L-6, a slim, unremarkable two-storey building, has become a very famous address. For word has gone around that it is the workstation of child...

Documents availed through RTI reveals that the Rural Development minister Shri Nitin Gadkari has ordered to bring drastic changes in the schedule of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which includes changing the labour to material ratio and restricting the implementation of MGNREGA in 1/3rd of backward blocks in India (please click here to access a note on labour-material ratio prepared by People's Action for Employment Guarantee-PAEG). The MoRD has notified the...

-The Business Standard World Bank-IMF study, however, says pace of reduction in absolute poverty has been substantial; report stresses skills training for youth India was home to about a third of the world's poor in 2011, according to a progress report on various social indicators from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued on Wednesday. In other words, the highest number of the poor lived in India in...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Overriding objections raised by senior officials, rural development minister Nitin Gadkari has ordered far-reaching changes in the job guarantee scheme (MGNREGS) which has provided seasonal work to one in three rural households in the last eight years. Documents obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act by activists show file notings by a senior official in the ministry arguing that Gadkari's announcements run contrary to the...

-Outlook Build toilets. But more important, get communities to change ways.   Vidya Balan, the Bollywood star and ambassador of the Indian government's programme for building household toilets, asks the mother-in-law who is busy toying with her bahu's ghunghat at the wedding ceremony: "Do you have a toilet at home for the dau­ghter-in-law to use?" Mum-in-law replies: "No." Vidya then asks her, "Then why are you extending her ghu­nghat so much when you...