Everything is in short supply here, especially hope. There was a flicker of it, though, when on April 30 Prime Minister Manmohan Singhcame here with Rahul Gandhi. Maybe the people were expecting a miracle, an end to the misery created by season after season of bad crops and the resultant rising debt. Their hope proved to be short-lived. Since then, nine farmers have killed themselves in Banda district alone, the...
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UNAIDS welcomes new initiatives taken at New York high-level meet by Aarti Dhar
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has welcomed the new targets set by world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly High Level Meeting on AIDS held in New York. Countries agreed to advance efforts towards reducing sexual transmission of HIV and halving by 2015 HIV infection among people who inject drugs. They also agreed to push towards eliminating new HIV infections among children in the next five years....
More »An exercise in undercounting the poor by Brinda Karat
The impending BPL Census exercise will not help the poor; on the contrary, it will further deny them a fair share in national resources. The BPL, or Below Poverty Line, Census 2011 for the rural areas will start in select States this month. In a country such as India with vast numbers of the poor, counting the poor often becomes an exercise in undercounting and dividing them, to suit the wholly...
More »The black money monster
-The Times of India The high drama over Baba Ramdev's midnight eviction and action against the peaceful gathering has shifted the focus away from the central is sue raised by the Baba – black money overseas – to the right to protest in a democracy. This being the case, there is danger of an uninformed debate on black money taking over, guided more by emotions and populist talk rather than...
More »Political will missing in the fight against black money by Mythili Bhusnurmath
If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it,' quipped Charles F Kettering , the famous American engineer and inventor of the electric starter. Well, the government has done just that! It has appointed an eight-member committee to examine ways to tackle black money. Perhaps that is too cynical! After all, the flurry of activity (the committee is only one of a series...
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