The world has made significant progress in income, education and health over the past 40 years, but the gains have been uneven and in some places war and the ravages of AIDS shortened life spans, according to a United Nations report on Thursday. Over all, average life expectancy around the globe jumped to 70 years in 2010, up from 59 in 1970. School enrollment through high school reached 70 percent...

Did Posco exaggerate the employment potential of its Rs 50,000 crore plant in Orissa? A group of US-based experts has accused the Korean steel giant and Orissa of fudging Statistics on potential jobs to hardsell the integrated steel plant. A paper prepared by Mining Zone Peoples' Solidarity Group — a collection of economic professors and engineers and others based in the US — has unravelled the figures estimated in an NCAER...

A meticulous study of the agrarian relations in three villages. ONE of our senior sociologists once drew my attention to the distinction between economics and other social sciences. Other social sciences – sociology and anthropology, for instance – he said, pay a great deal of attention to gathering primary data and interpreting them, whereas economics relies on secondary data for its analysis. This is, to a large extent, a fair...

Can the government break its own laws? That seems to be the case when it comes to minimum wages in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which makes the government the employer of the world’s largest workforce of close to 35 million job-card holders. In 19 states, the workers are getting less than the minimum wages in their areas, with the rural development ministry and the labour ministry looking the...

Even as the state sugar commissionerate has predicted a surplus sugarcane crop this year, farmers have a different take. They allege that this is a “ploy by co-operatives and the commissionerate” so that defunct sugar mills can be started again. Also, sugar prices are likely to see a sharp fall in the wake of the forecast. As per the official figures, Maharashtra is likely to produce around 8.5 million tonnes of...