-PTI Anna Hazare and his team on Thursday met the Election Commission in a bid to raise the pitch for electoral reforms and demanded that the 'right to reject' option be included in electronic voting Machines. Hazare, along with his close associates Santosh Hegde, Prashant Bhushan, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, discussed the matter for about an hour with Chief Election Commissioner S Y Qureshi. According to Team Anna, the meeting was "very...

Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...

-Rediff.com    The last six to seven years of the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar has not seen any significant increase in Maoist violence, which nevertheless continues to take a toll of lives and government property. According to figures compiled by the state police headquarters, in 2008, the Maoists destroyed three government buildings, blasted railway tracks at six places, besides two private buildings, torched five JCB Machines used in road construction and 12...

Rural women entrepreneurs in Rajasthan produce a nutritious food supplement as take home rations for pregnant mothers and underfed infants   There is very little that distinguishes the hamlet of Madri from the innumerable others that dot southern Rajasthan. This is a region where the Aravallis make their presence felt in gnarled hillocks, where water is scarce and where the land yields its harvests grudgingly. People here, including toddlers, know well the edge...

Seventy nine couples tied the knot in a rather unique mass marriage ceremony organized by Nana Baar Gaam Kadva Patidar Samaj at Thaltej on Sunday. What was special about the ceremony was that at least seven brides were tribal girls who were being accepted in the Patidar fold with blessings of parents of both brides and grooms. Sangeeta Babubhai from Bharuch was the bride of Gajendra Patel, a boy from Kalol....