-Live Mint The country is a happy hunting ground for communicable diseases In a Mint article last week, economist Dean Spears pointed out that the double whammy of high population density and unsanitary conditions in India stunts the growth of children, who bear a disproportionate burden of infectious diseases and lose their ability to absorb nutrients. Unless India ramps up its public health system, providing extra food will mean little for...
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Over 4,500 large dams lack emergency action plan
-PTI Till September 2011, only eight States have prepared EAP for 192 large dams Even as the Uttarakhand floods bring to the fore the debate over strength of dams, there are over 4,500 such structures in the country which are operating without an "emergency action plan" (EAP) rendering huge area and property vulnerable to cascading effects of dam failure. The Central Water Commission (CWC), which works under the Water Resources Ministry, had issued...
More »The politics of cheap rice in Karnataka -ND Shiva Kumar & Narayanan Krishnaswami
-The Times of India With the state budget all set to be presented on July 12, TOI takes a hard look at the government's cheap rice scheme and its impact on politics and employment. Will cheap rice boil? Let's look at the math. Reducing the price from Rs 3 to Re 1 per kg will help a family save Rs 60 per month. Till now, poor families got rice from the Public Distribution...
More »Millennium Development Goals are within reach, but stronger efforts needed –UN report
-The United Nations Thirteen years after the world set the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), countries have made big strides to meet the eight anti-poverty targets by their 2015 deadline, says a United Nations report released today, which stresses that the unmet goals are still within reach, but nations need to step up their efforts to achieve them. "In more than a decade of experience in working towards the MDGs, we have learned...
More »Nearly 21,000 species at risk of extinction: Conservationists
-AFP GENEVA: A freshwater shrimp, an island-dwelling lizard and a pupfish from Arizona have been declared extinct, while nearly 21,000 species are at risk of dying out, an updated "Red List" released on Tuesday showed. "The overall picture is alarming," said Jane Smart of the International Union for Conservation of Nature ( IUCN), which is behind the Red List of Threatened Species that to date has assessed 70,294 of the world's 1.82...
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