HINDIYANKALAN, India – One afternoon last November, 10 people in this eastern Indian village sat in a circle on a dirt road and told us about their fight against hunger. We wanted to know: What would drive a person to eat a poisoned root? I was on a research assignment with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. It was part of a...

BANWARA, India – In the fall of 2006, Gita Devi was pregnant with her sixth child when her family fell on hard times. A severe drought made it more difficult than ever to find farm work here in India’s northeastern plains. The family couldn’t afford food. It was unable to get a government ration card to buy grains and rice at steep discounts, even though it clearly was poor enough to...

Progressive strengthening of public facilities is the only way to reach medical services to the population as a whole. “The best form of providing health protection would be to change the economic system which produces ill health, and to liquidate ignorance, poverty and unemployment. The practice of each individual purchasing his own medical care does not work. It is unjust, inefficient, wasteful and completely outmoded ... In our highly geared, modern...

In what could be the first major signal of waning popularity of the UPA government’s flagship rural job scheme NREGS, data compiled by the Rural Development Ministry show that the number of households seeking employment under the scheme witnessed a drastic decline in 2011-12 fiscal as compared to the previous year. The data reveal that the number of households that availed jobs under NREGS declined by over 20 per cent during...

-The United Nations Africa and Asia together will account for 86 per cent of all growth in the world’s urban population over the next four decades, the United Nations said today, adding that this unprecedented increase will pose new challenges in terms of jobs, housing and infrastructure.   Africa’s urban population will increase from 414 million to over 1.2 billion by 2050 while that of Asia will soar from 1.9 billion to 3.3...