India will become the world’s most populous country in 2025, surpassing China, where the population will peak one year later because of declining fertility, according to United States Census Bureau projections released Tuesday. The bureau suggests that the projected peak in China, 1.4 billion people, will be lower than previously estimated and that it will occur sooner. With the fertility rate declining to fewer than 1.6 births per woman in this...

One-third of India is starving. In fact, this population has been in a state of chronic hunger, a factor which should be taken into account while evaluating the poverty situation, human rights activist and eminent doctor Binayak Sen said in a lecture at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences here on Monday. As a physician, “it’s been my privilege to read the politics of the bodies of my people,” said Dr....

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline...

The number of sex workers in the country may touch a whopping five million in just a few years, if the world's oldest profession is legalized as suggested by the Supreme Court, warn activists. Hearing a PIL by NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan about large scale child trafficking, the apex court had last week said that if the trade can't be curbed through punitive measures, legalizing it would be a better...

The key message of the book is that agriculture in South Asia is quite heavily stressed due to A complex set of socio-economic, agro-climatic, and hydrological factors WATER, AGRICULTURE AND SUSTAINABLE WELL-BEING: Edited by Unai Pascual, Amita Shah, Jayanta Bandyopadhyay; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 750. “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less...