There are serious concerns over shortages of food and housing as the country's population is expected to reach 1.45bn by 2035 The Madanpur Khadr colony is a tenement slum on the southern outskirts of Delhi, the Indian capital. A decade ago there was nothing here but green fields, buffaloes wallowing, goats grazing and the odd small dwelling. Now an estimated 40,000 people live in ramshackle, five-storey, brick and concrete homes, 10 to...

-PTI   Underlining the urgency to fight corruption in public life, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said it is the right time to move decisively in this direction. "Our efforts for rapid progress and development can have their full impact only if we curb corruption in public life and improve the processes of governance. I believe this is the right time to move decisively in this direction," Singh said addressing the two-day Conference...

Water, the most vital of all resources, has emerged as a key issue that would determine if Asia is headed toward cooperation or competition. After all, the driest continent in the world is not Africa but Asia, where availability of freshwater is not even half the global annual average of 6,380 cubic metres per inhabitant. When the estimated reserves of rivers, lakes, and aquifers are added up, Asia has less than...

-The Economist   The world’s population will reach 7 billion at the end of October. Don’t panic IN 1950 the whole population of the earth—2.5 billion—could have squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, onto the Isle of Wight, a 381-square-kilometre rock off southern England. By 1968 John Brunner, a British novelist, observed that the earth’s people—by then 3.5 billion—would have required the Isle of Man, 572 square kilometres in the Irish Sea, for its standing...

When put in charge, women in India are better than men at providing clean water and adequate sanitation for their communities. And despite the gains women have made in the developed world, they’re still doing about as much of the housework and childcare as women in India. The World Bank’s recently released 2012 World Development Report on gender equality and development shows progress in some areas, while in others gaps in...