On Monday, leaders from 191 countries will get together in New York to review the progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) – a set of eight targets to fight hunger, disease and ignorance to be met by 2015. India has already prepared an interim report that shows mixed progress. But can we inch closer to achieving any of these targets in the remaining five years? Unlikely, if one...

Ahead of the Millennium Development Goals Summit next week, India has expressed confidence that it would be able to reach its social and economic goals by the 2015 deadline. "India will not only have met the goals but it will be a shining example for other countries, Hardeep Singh Puri, India's envoy to the UN told PTI. "There is concern about some of these targets," Puri added, referring to child and maternal...

Around a quarter of the world’s population who are deprived of food live in India and 43 per cent of all children in the country under the age of five are malnourished, claims a recent report published by an international non-profit organisation. While India’s per capita income tripled between 1990 and 2005, the number of hungry people also increased by 53 million, bringing the total numbers of chronically hungry people in...

Around 22 districts in Rajasthan have been identified as those requiring immediate attention in terms of food security, according to the food security atlas of rural Rajasthan released jointly by the Institute of Human Development and the United Nation's World Food Programme (UNWFP) on Friday. The atlas further mentions the need of immediate, intensive intervention in ten out of these 22 districts to improve food and nutrition security. The atlas...

A combination of factors led by state policy has enabled the southern State to become a notable achiever with respect to some key indicators of development. In 2001, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recorded an eyebrow-raising fact in his book, “Development as Freedom”, that Tamil Nadu and Kerala had both achieved much faster rates of decline in fertility than China had achieved since it introduced its one-child policy. That same year, the international...