-The Hindu Major drop seen in open defecation India has made great gains in providing basic sanitation facilities since the start of the millennium, accounting for almost two thirds of the 650 million people globally who stopped practising open defecation between 2000 and 2017. However, a monitoring report by UN organisations released on Tuesday also shows that there has been absolutely no growth in the population with access to piped water facilities over...

-Down to Earth While we near the deadline of October 2, 2019 for ODF, concerns like non-functional toilets, poor sewage and drainage systems, lack of water, and poor faecal sludge management demand immediate attention of the new government In the last five years India saw a renewed focus on sanitation with the launch of Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) which aims to provide universal sanitation coverage by providing funds for constructing toilets, promoting...

  The Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation (MoWR, RD & GR) in its latest report has identified arsenic hotspots across the country, most notably in the states of Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Please consult chart-3 to get an idea about the geographical spread of arsenic hotspots in India. On the basis of arsenic concentration in the range 0.01-0.05 mg per litre...

-Outlook   Introduced to Nutrition Sensitive Integrated Farming System (NSIFS), or Poshan Kheti, by JEEViKA, Sushma Devi found that food produced in the family farm and kitchen garden was the perfect solution to feed her family sufficiently. Sushma Devi, a small farmer in Purnea, Bihar, was not able to provide diverse foods to her family of six members - comprising her husband, in-laws and children. Each of them has different dietary...

-Livemint.com Contrary to the assumption that the middle class is an urban phenomenon, a considerable segment of the Indian middle class resides in rural areas, finds a new study The size of the Indian middle class has always been at the heart of the narrative around India’s economic development. And yet the term middle class remains arbitrarily defined with estimates of its size and characteristics varying significantly based on subjective notions of...