The National Advisory Council, led by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, has come up with the muchawaited contours of the National Food Security Act. The NFSA, it is hoped, will become India’s flagship programme for tackling hunger and malnutrition, equal in scale and vision to the ambitious and highly successful Fome Zero Programme launched by President Lula Da Silva in Brazil. The UPA government is also hoping that the NFSA will...

Singapore is the most crowded country in the world, according to the Overpopulation Index. The index also finds that countries like United Kingdom, Netherlands and Switzerland are more crowded than India or China, which are the most populous nations on earth. The index was published by the Optimum Population Trust which has been campaigning for measures to stem the population growth in the United Kingdom. The trust has also sought strict measures...

HIV prevalence in India and South Asia is growing among sex workers and other high risk groups due to widespread failure to prevent stigmatising of people living with AIDS, according to a new report. Despite prevention and other efforts to reduce high-risk behaviours such as unprotected sex, buying and selling of sex, and injecting drug use, HIV vulnerability and risk remain high, says the report by a team from the...

Government on Thursday sanctioned funds for the second phase of the ambitious scheme to allocate unique identity numbers to 10 crore of the country's population. The Cabinet Committee on Unique Identification Authority of India, at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, approved the commencement of Phase II of the scheme at an estimated cost of Rs 3023.01 crore. "Of this, an amount of Rs. 477.11 crore would be towards recurring...

It's not China's special economic zones that chief minister Narendra Modi wants to replicate in Gujarat. The state government has taken a leaf out of the Chinese cultural revolution of late 1960s, when Mao Zedong formally attacked "western trained" medical system and floated the concept of ‘barefoot doctors'. The health ministry has decided to compensate for sharp shortage of allopathic doctors in the state by making large-scale appointment of barefoot...