A UN Habitat publication warns that inequalities and worsening informal settlements (read slums) could lead to widespread violence and chaos in the cities and towns of the world. The newly-released report titled “Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements 2009” says that with almost 200,000 new dwellers flooding into the world cities and towns each day, there is an urgent need to check the mushrooming of such settlements. The...

A fact finding team of many civil society organizations has reported widespread occurrences of murders, tortures and cases of police atrocities in Chhattisgarh in the name of combating Naxalism. It is also being alleged that in the name of their own security, journalists are being stopped from going to so called “combat zones” where security forces have launched an Operation Greenhunt to flush out armed Maoists.  Fifteen members of the...

“This is a country on the make.” The speaker was a young assistant to one of India’s rising political stars. And from his perspective, it did look that way. We were sitting in the lobby restaurant of New Delhi’s luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel. That evening, the Taj was not only the place for a government reception following Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s decisive re-election victory, but it was also the scene...

Some 300 million children in South Asia, or half of the region’s under-18 population, suffer from chronic levels of poverty, according to a new United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) study presented today at the opening of a conference in Bangladesh. To combat the enormous amount of poverty afflicting children, UNICEF urged leaders across the region to strengthen efforts tackling the lack of food, education, health, information, shelter, water and sanitation for...

Global population is going to cross the 7 billion mark by the year 2011. World population growth is almost entirely concentrated in the world's poorest countries. In a report prepared by the World Population Reference Bureau (www.prb.org), it has been found that within a span of 12 years, population of the world increased by 1 billion, which can be termed as a historic event. The report says that in the...