“India is Shining” in many ways, but the major hiccups in the run up to the Commonwealth Games (CWG), which opened on October 3 in New Delhi, highlight India's serious problems. Despite the colourful display of India's arts and culture at the grand opening ceremony, the frantic last minute interventions —including enlisting the Army (who did a remarkable job) to help with the final preparations — reveal the gross inefficiencies...

With business leaders and the Australian Government finally acknowledging the need to put a price on carbon, climate change is back on the agenda here in Australia and it's also on the agenda this week internationally. Representatives from countries around the world, including Australia, are assembling in Tianjin, China, as part of a crucially important United Nations Climate Change Conference that starts today. After last year's Copenhagen talks nearly collapsed, the...

In ten years, the living conditions of the poor have been improving—but not necessarily because of the UN’s goals EVEN at 70, Jiyem, an Indonesian grandmother, gets up in the small hours to cook and collect firewood for her impoverished household. Her three-year-old grandson is malnourished. Nobody in her family has ever finished primary school. Her ramshackle house lacks electricity; the toilet is a hole in the ground; the family...

Latin America, the poster child of bad economic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s, is leading the way in one rapidly evolving area of social development: conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. These schemes provide cash payments to poor households that meet certain behavioural requirements, generally related to children’s healthcare and education. The idea here is to support minimal levels of consumption through income transfers, while encouraging long-term human development. The...

Sixty-five per cent of hungry people in the world live in Asia, according to a new report on Food Security, which also warns that the gains of the Green Revolution could be at risk due to declining trends in agricultural research and rural investment.The report prepared by a group of researches led by noted agriculture scientist M S Swaminathan, who is also known as the father of India's Green Revolution,...