In Vijaypura village, marginalised women, especially widows, have used the RTI tool to procure food grains under PDS and are living a healthy life. The movement, instigated by a young RTI activist, boasts of achieving the millennium goal of reducing hunger by half in the region. It was from the state of Rajasthan that the Right to Information (RTI) movement emerged as an idea that went on to capture national...

A year after the World Health Organisation declared an Influenza A(H1N1) pandemic, a joint investigation by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has raised “troubling questions about how WHO managed conflicts of interest among the scientists who advised its pandemic planning, and about the transparency of the science underlying its advice to governments.” The open access findings are published in the journal (“Conflicts of interest:...

Are the world and human society in general ready and willing to take action on critical issues that require a major change in the manner in which we produce and consume goods and services?  The science of climate change is now well established. This is the result of painstaking work of over two decades carried out by thousands of scientists drawn from across the globe to assess every aspect of...

Corruption kills development and is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving the globally agreed targets to reduce poverty, hunger and other social ills by 2015, also known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), United Nations officials warned today. “When public money is stolen for private gain, it means fewer resources to build schools, hospitals, roads and water treatment facilities. When foreign aid is diverted into private bank accounts, major...

Indian policymakers are debating doing away with the mandatory rating of financial instruments in the long-term, among a set of measures aimed at strengthening the regulatory and disclosures regime for credit ratings. The expert group, set up by the High Level Coordination Committee on Financial Markets (HLCCFM), has made specific recommendations on improving and disclosing the way credit rating agencies rate financial instruments, and has sought debate on the very...