Despite some movement in primary education, assured rural employment and access to potable water, India continues to lag behind in realising the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set for 2015 by the United Nations, a new report says. Persistent inequalities, ineffective delivery of public services, weak accountability systems and gaps in implementing pro-poor policies are major bottlenecks to progress, said the country report on India pertaining to the Millennium Development Goals. It...
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Unwelcome surprise by Jayati Ghosh
In pushing for a greatly truncated PDS, the Food Security Bill proposed by the NAC, which has many right-to-food activists, undermines the PDS itself. ENSURING food security was the big promise of United Progressive Alliance-2. The promise to enact legislation to ensure a minimum quantity of affordable food to all poor households in the country was part of the election manifesto of the Congress party that leads the government. The 100-day...
More »Rural India's communication divide by V Sridhar and Shamsher Singh
The ubiquitousness of the mobile phone in urban areas and its spread in rural areas in India seem to have fed a notion — not substantiated by hard evidence — that there is a wide and deep market for such services in the countryside. Such a notion has remained largely unverified because of the scarcity of data on the extent of ownership of assets and access to services such as...
More »Half of India’s population lives below the poverty line by Arun Kumar
According to a new Oxford University study, 55 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, or 645 million people, are living in poverty. Using a newly-developed index, the study found that about one-third of the world’s poor live in India. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has been developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as a more precise and comprehensive means of...
More »No More Excuses To Eliminating Child Labour by Ananthapriya Subramanian
What do three members of the National Advisory Council, two members of the Planning Commission, Editors (including the editor and executive editor of this magazine), MPs from across the political spectrum, CII members and the NCPCR have in common? One single demand: no child under 14 should be engaged in child labour. Forty-five eminent members of society from very diverse backgrounds have thrown their considerable weight behind an ongoing campaign...
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