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...

The conclusions of the United Nations summit on the world's progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) present a gloomy picture. Some goals such as universal primary education, reducing child mortality, and improving maternal health are unlikely to be reached by the 2015 deadline. The world may be on track to meet the target of halving the number of people living under $1 a day, but the numbers suffering from...

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...

A strong protagonist who overcomes all odds, a village scoundrel who takes advantage of the ignorance and naivete of the people around him, family drama Usha Rajeswari's new directorial venture has all this and more. But Shakti Pirakkudhu' (A New Strength Is Born) is not your regular Tamil feature film. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman with two kids, and the odds she surmounts are the difficulties faced by women...

Peeved at being paid just Re. 1 as their daily wage for the labour they put in under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), workers of Gudlia Gaon under Rupbas Panchayat of Tonk district in Rajasthan are set to tread Bapu's path to protest against the injustice meted out to them. These workers will stage a Satyagraha in Jaipur on October 2 and return the entire money that...