-The United Nations A United Nations treaty entering into force today will extend the labour and social rights of some 53 million domestic workers around the world. From today, the Domestic Workers Convention will be legally binding for signatory countries. The treaty was adopted in 2011 by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and is the first of its kind. "Today's entry into force of Convention 189 sends a powerful signal to more than...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: A working group of the Sonia-Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has called for the creation of dedicated human resource departments at central ministries dealing with social programmes to ensure better delivery of the government's flagship schemes. The working group has suggested that the proposed HR wings should be entrusted with the responsibility of framing guidelines for recruitment and training of frontline workers, besides laying down key performance indicators...

-The Hindu Biomass cookstoves and solar lighting improve the health of women and are creating business models that empower them Around the world three billion people have no access to modern cooking fuels. They depend mostly on direct burning of solid biomass for cooking and heating. The smoke from these rudimentary stoves causes some four million deaths annually, destroys millions of tonnes of crops and leads to global warming and large-scale regional...

-The Business Standard While economic growth may reduce poverty, no systematic correlation between the pace of poverty decline and the pace of economic growth can be found in the data Recent publication of new numbers on poverty by the Planning Commission has revived some old controversies. The numbers show that while the incidence of poverty declined both between 1993-94 and 2004-05 and between 2004-05 and 2011-12, the pace of decline was much...

-The Hindu With the economic boom petering out, those who benefitted from it are angry with the government for the Food Security Bill because it is paying attention to the needs of the underprivileged for a change This week's received wisdom insists that the Indian economy has irretrievably collapsed because on Monday, the Lok Sabha passed the National Food Security Bill (NFSB). The Hindu Business Line headline (Aug.28, page 1) said it...