While the country has made progress in reducing poverty, it has lagged behind in improving sanitation India has made headway in reducing poverty and giving access to drinking water for much of its population, but has lagged behind in improving sanitation, food security, maternal mortality and gender equity standards, putting it at risk of missing key targets, said the Millennium Development Goals Report 2012 released on Monday. According to the report, which...

-The United Nations 20 June 2012 – World leaders, along with thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups have come together in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to take part in the UN Sustainable Development Conference (Rio+20).   In our Seven Issues, Seven Experts series, UN officials tell us more about the key issues being discussed at the conference and how we can contribute to make our...

-The Hindustan Times Culture and tradition have always been cited as the bedrocks on which our superior family values are founded. But like so many elevating qualities that we feel we are endowed with, this too is largely a myth. A recent survey by Child Rights and You found that one-third of Delhi feels that children should work as hard as adults and that they should be paid less. The invisibility...

-The Times of India SIDLAGHATTA: That the girl child is stereotyped is nothing new. But this school in Sidlaghatta, 60 km from Kolar, took it to another level with its girl students. The school does not have a group D employee to do the regular cleaning. So the girls in the school clean the toilets, among other things, after their classes. Ironically, the Higher Primary School at Ammaganahalli won the 'Best School...

Rudyard Kipling opens his superb novel with the street urchin Kim teasing the son of a wealthy man. Kim kicks Chota Lal, whose father, Lala Dinanath, is worth half-a-million sterling, off the trunnion of the mighty cannon Zam-Zammah. Kipling loved India and wrote that it was the only democratic place in the world. It warms us to read this, but of course this was quite untrue in Kipling’s time and...