India will host the Delhi Investment Summit on Afghanistan later this week, which will witness participation from private firms from the region, including Pakistan and China.

Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said the country will take at least 10 years to achieve the Nirmal Bharath status, when all the 2.4 lakh grama panchayats in the nation could be declared free of open defecation under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA).

Addressing a review meeting of the NBA’s Kerala version here on Monday, Mr. Ramesh said only 28,000 grama panchayats, constituting a mere 12 per cent, were currently declared as Nirmal Grama Panchayats.

The recent act of Taliban blocking polio vaccination drive in Waziristan has had the health authorities in India worried. While India has not reported any polio case for over a year now, the cross border polio importation threatens India’s success over crippling polio virus.

Given the incredible success, recently, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has put India off the list of polio endemic countries, leaving Pakistan, Nigeria and Afganistan in the list of endemic countries.

Less than four months ago the world was cheered to learn that India had gone a full year with no new cases of polio - a landmark that left only Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria on the World Health Organization's list of countries where the disease is endemic.

But the battle is far from over, judging by the WHO's latest expressions of alarm. It says that in both Nigeria and Afghanistan the number is creeping up, while budget shortfalls are jeopardising the effort to hold polio at bay in 24 other high-risk countries. Right now the numbers of new infections are small.

External Affairs Minister S M Krishna has told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Washington’s chairmanship of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) would give a “final impetus” to New Delhi’s

More than 70 people, most women and children, are feared dead after a landslide triggered by a double earthquake engulfed their Afghan village, officials said on Tuesday.

In a bid to further consolidate India’s growing economic interests in Afghanistan, coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal is all set to lead a high-level delegation to Kabul over the next fortnight to in

A nine-member Pakistani delegation has arrived in India to learn from its experience of polio eradication.

Pakistan saw a manifold rise in polio cases this year, and is one of the three countries, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, where the infectious viral disease is still prevalent. India became polio-free in January this year, after one full year without a single case being reported. It has subsequently been removed from the WHO list of polio-endemic countries.

The last three countries where polio is still paralysing children -- Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria -- said on Thursday that they have enlisted Muslim women and religious leaders to allay fears