India faces the challenge of inappropriate use of antibiotics while Bharat copes with poor access to treatment, resulting in a policy conundrum and inaction. India was recently in the news for the wrong reasons. The serious threat posed by the newly discovered microbe, NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo--lactamase-1), resistant to many antibiotics, triggered alarm and panic. Predictions that the country will not meet the millennium development goal for child mortality caused dismay....

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been removed as the managing director of Grameen Bank, the organisation he founded in Bangladesh in 1983 to help the poor. The central bank has cited a rule that requires retirement at 60 to order the ouster of the 70-year-old “banker to the poor” who has been embroiled in a Norwegian funds scandal. Yunus had also fallen out with the political establishment after, fresh from the Nobel...

Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has launched a legal battle, one day after he was sacked from the Grameen microfinance bank he founded. Prof Yunus lodged a case in Bangladesh's High Court challenging his dismissal from the post, lawyers said. The central bank sacked him saying he was past retirement age and had been improperly installed in his post. Grameen Bank disputes the accusations. He has been under pressure from the government to...

INDIA will soon be the first country to commercially cultivate biofortified pearl millet, or bajra. The crop has been biofortified to improve its iron and zinc nutrients, and will be released in 2012 by HarvestPlus, a global alliance of research and implementing agencies. To be distributed in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, the crop has been developed by HarvestPlus’ sister concern International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)....

Cash transfers, the latest global development fashion, involve several risks in India, not least the risk of forgetting the need for continuing structural change. WHEN I was growing up, several decades ago, middle-class society in India was always a little delayed in catching on to Western fashions whether in music or dress or in other aspects. The past decades of globalisation seemed to have changed all that. Modern communications technology...