In a long straight row, the boys walked slowly down a narrow lane in Seelampur market, in east Delhi's maze of congested neighbourhoods. There were some 21 of them between 10 and 14 years old. Passersby stopped and stared. The boys could have been schoolchildren following their teacher's instructions. Instead, they were victims of child labour just freed through a rescue operation. “My brother brought me to Seelampur from Nepal,” says a scared Tojib, only 10 years old. “He went back to our village. I have been working here since five or six months. I get Rs. 2,500 a month. I work from 9 am to 5 pm.” Three rescued children nod in unison. Seelampur market is dotted with small manufacturing units churning out toys, shoes and garments. The Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), an NGO working since 1996 on child rights, led the rescue mission. Its activists had cautiously scanned the area, spotted the child workers and then informed the Delhi police and the labour department. Operations like these are always dicey. There is the risk of getting beaten up, the children running away, news of the raid being leaked by officials, or the factory owner not turning up. A worker of the BBA puts the children at ease, assuring them about their safety and promising they would be sent home very soon. Comforted by his words, the frightened children open up. The truth tumbles out. They were promised Rs. 2,500 a month but they hadn't got anything except Rs. 100 per week as pocket money. Also read : ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
The Anna Hazare group has hogged the headlines with its draft Jan Lokpal Bill, but a low-key process by the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) has yielded proposals in the form of five draft concept notes which could,with further discussion, become the basis for a draft law. The NCPRI draws on experience and its proposals emerge from discussions in which contrary views are frequently expressed. It includes groups like the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, (MKSS), which work at the grassroots and have valuable insights into the functioning of institutions at ground level. If the NCPRI has come to be seen as being slower than the Hazare group, it is because it approaches the creation of a draft law as a complex process. The NCPRI's discussions on the Lokpal have included Justice A.P. Shah, Sailesh Gandhi, Usha Ramanathan, Annie Raja, Harsh Mander, Pratyush Sinha, Amitabh Mukhopadhyay, Aruna Roy, Shekhar Singh and Nikhil Dey among others. There have been conversations with Justice J.S. Verma, though he hasn't been formally involved. While the Hazare group has proposed an all-powerful Lokpal/Lokayukta structure, the NCPRI has suggested a basket of measures which will tackle corruption in all its forms at various levels. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Managements of public sector companies have been asked to pay serious attention to social and environmental concerns. Top managers will see their performance judged on the basis of what their companies do by way of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable practices. They have been told to spend between 0.5 and 2 per cent of their profits after tax – depending on the size of the company – on such initiatives. To help them do so without getting waylaid by political interests, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) will serve as a CSR hub for the public sector. It will help define projects and choose social sector partners for the companies. A website will provide the status of projects. Bhaskar Chatterjee, secretary in the department of public enterprises, spelt out the new guidelines and how they are to be implemented. Extracts from the interview: What do you envisage pubic sector companies doing with the two per cent of their profits mandated for CSR? Since it is a large amount of money, it can do as much harm as good? We do not want to impose a uniform two per cent expenditure on account of CSR. That is a proposal of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. We have, in fact, a different sliding scale depending on the size of the organization. If you are a big company with a profit after tax approaching somewhere around Rs 5,000 crore, then a two per cent spend on CSR becomes a humungous amount. So, in that case, we have given the option of spending between 0.5 per cent and 1.5 per cent. But if you are a medium- sized company you have the option of spending between one per cent and two per cent. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
Jackfruit curry has always been hugely popular in Sri Lanka. But now it is more popular than it has ever been because of a ‘minimal processing' revolution that has swept the island. “Earlier, most homes would make jackfruit curry only during weekends. Thanks to minimal processing, now we make it twice or thrice a week,” says Dr Subha Heenkenda, a senior officer in the department of agriculture in Sri Lanka. Minimal processing makes jackfruit ready to cook. The result is that consumption has shot up to five tonnes of tender jackfruit and 10 tonnes of the unripe variety in a day. Sri Lanka now has more than 200 minimal processing units offering ready-to-cook polos (tender jackfruit) and kos (mature jackfruit). Polos curry, of course, is like a signature recipe of Sri Lanka. It is available in most of the hotels and restaurants. In tinned form, it is exported to many countries. Many people here in India still don't know that jackfruit is a versatile vegetable too. As a vegetable, it has four stages – tender, slightly grown, mature unripe and ripe. Sri Lanka has a tradition of using it not only as a vegetable, but as staple, in place of rice. The Sinhala name for the jackfruit tree – Baat Gasa – means ‘tree of rice'. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PEOPLE who take heart from growth figures and see Indian poverty levels
going down should visit the sweatshops in the slums of Delhi This is the true picture of Indian poverty and the inadequate investment that we are making in our future generations. Growth without governance and a social agenda is merely a number. For growth to work for everyone, it has to come with equal opportunities under the law, affordable housing, access to water and health care. Children need to be in school. In more than 20 years of liberalisation and reforms in India, we haven’t come anywhere close to bridging the social deficit in the country. It can, in fact, be argued, with evidence on the ground, that growth has widened disparities. This is not to say we don’t need rapid growth. But it must come with governance. Finding solutions has also become more complex as time passes because of policy confusions and muddled notions of public-private partnerships emanating out of the various limbs of the government. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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The house down a narrow brick lane in Jalalpur village is brightly painted. Peep into its spacious courtyard and you see the family busy with water. Children are splashing around under a hand pump, women are drinking water from another hand pump while men are quickly filling buckets. Outside it looks like an ideal village setting until the stink of a narrow open drain suddenly hits you. Keep walking down the lane and the stench gets stronger, like from a mountain of garbage which has been rotting for decades. The reek is from the Kali Nadi which flows next to Jalalpur village on the outskirts of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Around 2,000 villagers have been living with this foul smell for many years. “We have two options – stop drinking water and die in the next few days or keep drinking water and die maybe after a few years,” says Mohammad Idris looking sadly at the river, holding his little boy's hand. The Kali Nadi has become a river of sorrow. Its waters, once so pure, are black with filth. Years ago the river was worshipped. Now it stands for disease and death. “In the 1970s, villagers used to directly drink water from the river. It was crystal clear,” says Raman Kant, director of Neer Foundation, an NGO which has been working for water conservation, environment renewal and organic farming for almost 12 years now. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
Every year Chadaram, a weaver from Napasar village in Rajasthan, used to make the tedious journey to Jodhpur to sell his cloth for a meagre sum of money. Sometimes things were so bad he would work on construction sites as a labourer. But now he is a shareholder in Rangsutra, an artisans' company. And he earns Rs. 10,000 a month. In Delhi to attend his company's annual general meeting with around 1,200 shareholders, all small artisans like himself, Chadaram said they were deeply grateful. “No one has given us a share of profits before,” he said. His fellow artisans, who had never heard of entrepreneurship or having a stake in a company, feel a sense of pride and dignity. Rangsutra is giving that unusual taste of entrepreneurship to some of the most disadvantaged artisans of Rajasthan, Assam and Uttarakhand by successfully engaging them and giving them a sustainable livelihood. “Profit is not a dirty word,” says Sumita Ghose, 51, who is behind this innovative business. Started five years ago, Rangsutra is now a Rs. 7 crore company. This year it is giving out a 25 per cent dividend – its third – to its shareholders. With share value having appreciated four times, raising an enterprise couldn't have been more rewarding. Next on the cards is to open up that shareholding to outsiders. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
The Mahatma Gandhi National Right to Employment Guarantee Act, (MGNREGA) can only succeed if it is implemented as a rights- driven programme. It has to become a law in which rural households are active participants who demand work when they need it instead of it being a state welfare programme. In order for this Act to succeed, rural households need to know their rights. It is only logical to assume that unless the rural poor are informed of their rights, are trained in how to demand and receive those rights, they will remain passive, uninformed beneficiaries. In 2005, when India legislated NREGA, the rural poor for the first time got the right to demand and receive employment. While the right is limited to 100 days of work per family, per year, the implementation of MGNREGA by the Union Government was an innovative approach to providing rural households with a safety net when they could not find work elsewhere. In addition to the right to demand work, this Act gave a number of other rights for the first time to the poor including unemployment compensation if work was not provided and compensation for injury on the job. Every State was required to legislate its own NREGA Act with the stipulation that all rights given by the Central Act were to be included in the State Act. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
Diabetes mellitus (DM) in general is a chronic metabolic disorder in which the body is unable to make proper use of glucose which results in hyperglycemia (increase in blood sugar level) and glycosuria (increase in sugar levels in urine). In particular, Type I DM is characterized by loss of insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas leading to deficiency of insulin in the body. Type II DM is characterized by insulin resistance or reduced insulin sensitivity. Both lead to hyperglycemia, which largely causes acute signs of diabetes; excess urine production, compensatory thirst and increased fluid intake, blurred vision, unexplained weight loss, lethargy, change in energy metabolism etc. The symptoms of diabetes can be correlated to the symptoms of Prameha. Prameha is a metabolic disorder explained extensively in Ayurveda literature. Prameha, holds the twin meanings of “Prabhutha mutratha” or excessive urination and “Avilmutratha” or turbid urine. Etiological factors of Prameha:
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