When the rest of the country is going in circles seeking health insurance for the society's most vulnerable, these slum-dwellers are part of a health security fund to which each person contributes Rs 60 annually.
Cement shipments from Pakistan will hit the Indian markets by the end of the month at prices that are up to a third lower than domestic prices.
Organised retail in India's rural hinterland is a very different ball game from what it is in urban centres.
Social entrepreneurship is a marriage between effective business techniques and social good. It is something that Mahatma Gandhi pioneered, Uday Khemka tells Business Standard.
The MEP has been raised from $225 a tonne in May to $495 a tonne in October. Despite this, domestic onion prices have risen sharply. They are currently available at Rs 24 -28 per kg at the retail level, compared with Rs 8-10 a kg in May.
About 50,000 to 100,000 people - representing associations of farmers, traders, hawkers, and even chemists from all over India - will converge on Mumbai's Azad Maidan to demand that big corporations quit the retail business.
These villages don't have citizens and hence there is no National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme for them or any health services or cheap rations.
A social activist in Bhopal has grabbed the essence of consumerism to work out a social security programme that should give the proposed social security programme of the Government of India a run for its money.
It is to be funded through a Rs 2400 crore (Rs 24 billion) corpus that has accrued to the Ministry for Social Justice and Empowerment from public sector banks.
As companies open the floodgates for corporate social responsibily projects, it means a new source of funds for many NGOs who are being hired to do the good things the companies want to show in their portfolios.
The Indian Sugar Mills' Association, the industry lobby group, will take the proposal to Food & Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar soon, sources close to the development said.
The group of ministers on the rehabilitation policy has devised separate solutions for the two set of people affected by the acquisition of land by industry.
Groaning under the burden of huge arrears to sugarcane farmers and rising losses, leading sugar producers of Uttar Pradesh have begun filing cases against a December 2006 directive of the state government on sugarcane prices.
National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation, the central government's procurement agency for non-cereal crops, is in talks with leading retail companies to serve as a back-end supply chain in agri-commodities.
In India, where land acquisition for industrial and real estate development has been widespread, the Land Acquisition Act makes the government the master of all that it surveys
When the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission shot off notices to 14 cement producers on July 25 for allegedly colluding to raise prices, it was New Delhi's latest flank against the industry.
Large retail chains like Reliance Fresh, Subhiksha and Spencer's have not been able to do sourcing of their entire farm products directly from the farmers.
Kartaar Singh, a farmer of Mokha village in Punjab's Kapurthala district, used to travel about 50 km on his scooter to Jalandhar's new sabzi mandi, or wholesale vegetable market, to sell his vegetables every day.
The rural development ministry has come in direct conflict with the communications ministry, which has refused to accept its request for disbursing wages under the rural job scheme through post offices without charging any fee.
The recent blacklisting of 600 NGOs by the Union rural development ministry was meant to stem the rot in the functioning of its autonomous body called Council for Advancement of People's Action And Rural Technology or Capart.
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