India has been ranked 67, way below neighbouring countries like China and Pakistan, in a new global hunger index by the International Food Policy Research Institute. The index, released on Monday, rated 84 countries on the basis of three leading indicators -- prevalence of child malnutrition, rate of child mortality, and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient. China is rated much ahead of India at the ninth place. The 2010 Global...

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government believed in inclusive Growth and wanted to ensure that the benefits of Growth reached every individual across the country, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said here on Saturday. Over the past six-and-a-half years, the UPA government had strived to ensure economic Growth, provide employment to people and raise the resources required for implementing poverty alleviation programmes. “We recognise that Growth is necessary for sustaining our programmes. At...

Global steel giants ArcelorMittal (MT) and Posco are leading $80 billion in planned spending in India, an investment that would vault the country ahead of Japan as the second-biggest steelmaker. There's one hurdle: India's farmers and their water supply. The farmers refuse to move from irrigated land in three states that hold more than half of India's reserves of iron ore, a key material used in the making of steel....

About three kilometers from this village, across dirt tracks and open scrubland, there is a settlement of seven mud huts bordered by millet and lentil fields. No electricity or telephone poles run to these huts. There’s not a satellite dish to be seen. In the dry, open land that surrounds the settlement — part of the great Thar Desert that dominates the western part of the state of Rajasthan — black...

The definition of poverty has been at the core of discussions and commitments at the international level to address it and, by a logical conclusion, to eradicate it. This intent is the basis for the lofty Millennium Development Goals adopted by the UN member-states and international organisations at the beginning of this century. Now, 10 years later, the UN Summit on MDGs in New York last month was meant to...