-IANS   Assam has been allocated $2.5 million by a UN body to help improve hygiene in rural areas, stressing on the economic gains that would follow "when people spend less money on preventable sanitation-related diseases". India is among 10 countries - seven African and three Asian - which have been identified for a five-year project. India loses $53.4 billion annually due to poor sanitation and hygiene, according to a recent report...

The Opposition slammed the Naveen Patnaik government today for trying to make a political capital out of the flood relief operation by allegedly distributing relief material in bags emblazoned with conch symbol of the ruling party. The Biju Janata Dal (BJD), however, refuted the charge describing it as politically motivated. The state government decided to provide relief to the flood-hit for another seven days and provide them work under the Mahatma...

Stories abound in Bhopal of the life and death of Shehla Masood. But among those who knew her, there appears agreement on one point: something was so uncharacteristically passive, so un-Shehla-like, they say, about the dead body slumped in the driving seat of the silver-grey Santro on the morning of August 16, with no evident signs of struggle and a bullet hole in the neck. Some crude clues to the extraordinary...

-PTI   A BJP team which visited Paramakudi, the scene of the September 11 police firing in which seven persons were killed, today said the incident was a result of "police excesses" and could have been avoided. The team, which included BJP national spokesperson Nirmala Seetharaman and Lok Sabha MPs Arjun Ram Meghwal and Kirit Solanki, condemned the firing and claimed that even after the incident people were targeted by police during the...

As I write this my city Delhi is drowning. It started raining early this morning and within a few hours the city has come to a standstill. The television is showing scenes of traffic snarled up for hours, roads waterlogged and people and vehicles sunk deep in water and muck. The meteorological department records that some 60 mm of rain has fallen in just about 6 hours; 90 mm in 24...