Six items prioritised for Prajapatham The State Cabinet has identified six priorities for this year's Prajapatham mass-contact programme proposed to be held from May first week to solve the people's identified problems. They are drinking water supply and sanitation; implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) with emphasis on arresting migration of labour; social security benefits like pensions and ration cards; disbursement of arrears to self-help groups under Pavala Vaddi...

It is not often that a social security programme the size of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS - New Delhi has spent Rs 40,000 crore on it in 2010/11 alone - faces an existential moment. But, April 2011 will present one such crossroad: the end of the term of a bureaucrat widely acknowledged as the prime mover behind the five-year old scheme. Brought in six years ago to the Centre from her parent...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

The Centre will come up with a new National Water Policy next year that will address the issues of water scarcity, management and conservation, Union Water Resources Minister Salman Khurshid said here on Monday. The Ministry has already undertaken an exercise to review the National Water Policy of 2002, and is holding consultations with various stakeholders on the new policy, which would take on board issues relating to climate change. Addressing the...

Anna Hazare, the 72-year-old social activist and Gandhian, on Monday slammed Union Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal for reportedly saying that the Lokpal Bill will not eradicate corruption from India. Hazare said that if Sibal has no faith in the proposed Lokpal then he should resign from the committee that has been formed to draft a stronger anti-corruption law. "If Kapil Sibal feels that nothing will happen from Lokpal Bill, he should...