In line with its National E-Governance Plan, the Government of India recently launched the India Development Gateway, which seeks to “foster inclusive growth and empower its rural users through relevant information in six languages – Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali…

Under the auspices of its ”e-gram” initiative, which intends to connect all villages through broadband, the Gujarat government has launched an e-medicine scheme for rural areas.  The objective of the scheme is to “offer online and telemedicine facilities to villagers,” specifically through…

While the government of India wrestles with its official stance on homosexuality, the gay-lesbian scene in Bangalore is flourishing. Just last week,

The Delhi high court directed the Union government to figure out its stance on homosexuality; the ministry of home…

In a prior post, Vinay wrote about a groundbreaking event – the establishment of the first ever bank run for and by sex workers in Kamathipura, Bombay.

As a follow up to that post, OneWorld South Asia reports today that the…

OneWorld South Asia just published a great piece by Bappa Majumdar on India’s preparation for one of the world’s biggest ever censuses. This once in ten-year exercise is an important national report card, especially to understand the impact that the growing…

Your daily dose of headlines:

• Can India meet the MDGs on access to safe drinking water? Keya Acharya has this interesting analysis [via OneWorld South Asia]
• Thai fruit wine, responsible outsourcing and organic cotton – some of the interesting ideas competing in…

Two stories display how there are possibilities for creativity in supplementing Indian education and providing more options for students. OneWorld South Asia reports on FM stations in Bihar that will set up shop in high schools:

The channels would host phone-in programmes…

• Employment: The social justice ministry concluded that the participation ratio of SCs/STs in the NREGA, a rural job scheme, shows that despite the fact that tribals are half the number of Dalits, they consistently outnumber them in the program, and that…

Starting April 1st, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which provides at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment to every household whose adult members volunteer to work on labour-intensive public works annually, will be implemented in all 604 districts across India. …

• Oneworld South Asia highlights that India’s strategy to combat Multi Drug Resistant TB (MDR-TB) might be failing to stop the spread of the disease. There are 2.2 million new cases of TB every year.
• The CGAP Microfinance Technology Blog picked up a story…