-One World South Asia The World Bank signs an agreement with India to inject $ 352 million into the National Dairy Support Project, an initiative designed to revive the flagging fortunes of milk production in the country. Other than being crucial to the nutritional security of the country’s population; dairy farming or dairying is also a major source of livelihood for 147 million rural households in India. Spurred by the success of the...

What is it that makes the Indian middle class treat their Domestic Help with such derision and abuse? In her nine years as a nurse working with rescued domestic workers in Delhi, Mariamma K. thought she had seen the worst. That was until 2010, when she and her colleagues went to rescue a 17-year-old girl from a home in west Delhi. Sangeeta was found with bite marks all over her body....

HETA, India – At the entrance to this village in India’s eastern state of Jharkhand, a large pond glistened under the bright autumn sun. Yellow and blue lilies surrounded it. A tailor was stitching clothes outside his shop while a few boys nearby were playing carrom on the lid of a rusted oil barrel. It was a tranquil, rustic setting – a candidate for a landscape painting, it seemed. But it...

Statistics can abet illusions, unless properly understood and used. The debates on poverty line and budget deficits reflect a lack of understanding of the meaning and purpose of these measures. India has been recently witness to furious debates on measures of poverty and budget deficits. Any measure can be used only for the purpose it is designed for. The debates in the present cases were furious, because preconceptions and emotions were...

The northern region of Gujarat State in western India is semi-arid and prone to droughts, receiving almost all of its rain during the monsoon season between June and September. But for the past three decades, many crop and dairy farms have remained green—even during the dry season. That's because farmers have invested in wells and pumps, using massive amounts of electricity to extract water from deep aquifers. The government has artificially propped...