-NationalGeographic.com She grew up in an affluent New York town but soon after college, Ajaita Shah went to her parents’ native India to work with the poor JAIPUR: “I saw a 5-year-old die in five seconds,” says Ajaita Shah, recalling the Indian girl enveloped by a kerosene fire at home. “There was nothing we could do.” Not then. But since that 2008 disaster, Shah has helped cut the use of kerosene lamps in...

-Down to Earth Poverty is urbanising at a rapid pace, it says Despite the growing number of social safety net schemes to improve lives of the poor, it is still a distant dream for the almost half of the world’s poor to come under it. According to a recent World Bank report, nearly 55 per cent of the total world’s poor population is still out of its coverage. The poverty is rising...

-Business Standard Successors to Millennium Development Goals should be achievable - and clearly written "By 2030 reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births." Everyone understands what this statement means. It is simple, comprehensible, concise, specific and quantifiable. In September 2015, the Milennium Development Goals, or MDGs, will be replaced by sustainable development goals, or SDGs. There are several parallel channels flowing into SDG formulation. One...

-Deccan Herald Many of India's agricultural practices have barely changed in decades. Reform is long overdue. Nearly a quarter of a century after India launched its first big liberalising reforms in 1991, setting off a new spurt of growth, one area of the country’s economy remains hardly touched: farming. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a 24-hour, state-run television channel for farmers in May, but has fostered no public debate about how to improve...

-The Telegraph Mayong (Morigaon): It was just some weeks ago that Jogeswar Bangthai, Ganesh Saikia and Mohammad Anar Ali were dreaming of a bumper crop as they gazed at their fields that had turned golden with the ripe paddy waiting to be harvested. A few days more and their granaries would brim over. Or so they thought. Then came the rain that refused to go away. In this fabled land of black magic, farmers...