-PTI   India has contributed to a large reduction in global poverty, according to the UN annual report on the Millennium Development Goals , which also pointed out that despite progress, the most vulnerable sections of society were being left out. The report, which was released on Thursday , said that poverty continues to decline in many countries and regions. It said that the fastest and sharpest reductions in poverty were in Eastern...

Those of us interested in gender equality tend to be obsessed with the politically and economically important areas in which we need this equality — education, employment, health, political representation. But equality in these important but grim attributes leaves out many things that actually make life more enjoyable and thus more worth living. Women deserve more from gender equality than better housekeeping and management skills. In most societies, men are much...

Arvind Kejriwal, a member of the joint drafting committee for the Lokpal Bill, is disappointed at the way the government has treated the suggestions made by the civil society for the new Lokpal Bill. In an interview with Thufail PT, he talks about the future of the campaign, the charges of the right-wing bias in the campaign and why it is okay to take funds from corporates for such campaigns....

-Reuters   Clad in white home-spun garments and living in a spartan room of his village's Hindu temple, Anna Hazare is an unlikely thorn in the side of the government hundreds of miles away in New Delhi. And yet for millions of Indians, he is a 21st-century Mahatma Gandhi, inspiring a rare wave of protests against the spiralling corruption that has tarnished the up-and-coming image of Asia's third-largest economy. Like Gandhi, who led India's...

It is essential for India to raise the level of public expenditure in education to ensure quality. THE failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country....