VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

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...

The rural non-farming sector has been growing faster than that of the urban since early 1970s, says a report. The report on "Comparative growth between non-farming economy of rural and urban area" by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) said the share of rural non-farming economy in rural gross domestic product (GDP) has increased from 28 percent in 1970-71 to 46 percent in 1999-2000. It said...

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...

The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008. Last week's long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence. As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China,...