The United Nations commemorates World Population Day next week against the backdrop of an upcoming landmark event: global population hitting the seven billion mark by late October this year. According to current projections, and with some of the world's poorest nations doubling their populations in the next decade, the second milestone will be in 2025: an eight billion population over the next 14 years. Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N....

-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...

Retirement at 60 means a relaxed life for most people. Not so for 70-year-old P Mukundan, managing director of Servals Automation Pvt Ltd, though. He did retire from his busy business life at 60 but chose to become a social entrepreneur after that. He started a social enterprise that is 'for-profit' but that touches the lives of those who live in rural areas all over the world. In 2002, Mukundan started manufacturing...

On May 23, the president of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi, laid the foundation stone of a bridge being built across the river Ravi, linking Jammu and Kashmir with Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Ten days later, she was in Rajasthan, inaugurating the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. For both trips she had to travel far from her place of residence, which — given her position — would have involved careful planning beforehand,...

Large parts of India that already face chronic food shortages are staring at further, climate change induced food insecurity by 2050, new research by a global partnership of agricultural research institutions has found. Researchers at the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have found a worrying match between regions that are most likely to face climate change induced reduction in crop yield, and areas that already suffer from chronic...