The audience, organisers, and fightersknow that sham wrestling is not to betaken seriously. But the World Economic Forum takes itself seriously. The comforting thing about the sham wrestling ‘championships' on television is that everybody knows they are a farce. Steroid-stuffed Cro-Magnons stomp the living daylights out of painkiller-primed Neanderthals. Good, unclean fun. The results are safely predictable. You should expect the 600-pound gorilla to overwhelm the 900-pound one in a staggering...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...

The government's ambitious Socio-economic and Caste Census 2011, the bedrock for many social schemes, is facing a human resource crisis that is likely to delay not only the survey, but also many big-ticket electoral promises of the UPA government, such as the National Food Security Bill. To salvage the situation, the rural development ministry, which is executing the census through state governments, recently approached the Registrar General of India (RGI) for...

The annual report of the International Institute for Labour Studies projects a grim future for employment prospects. WITH the United States and much of Europe grappling with the slowdown in their economies and the resultant social unrest, the publication of the World of Work Report 2011: Making Markets Work for Jobs could not have come at a more opportune moment. Brought out by the International Institute for Labour Studies, which was...

Father Cedric Prakash is a human rights and peace activist based in Ahmedabad. He has campaigned for the justice of the victims of the 2002 communal violence on peril of being publicly branded as “non-Gujarati and non-Hindu” by chief minister Narendra Modi. A resident of Gujarat for nearly 40 years, Prakash is the founding director of Prashant, a centre for human rights, peace and justice. He was named Chevalier of the...