Poor families may find it tough to pay for medical care, children's education “Recent gains in poverty reduction made in Asia will be undermined” Resurgent global food prices, which averaged 10 per cent in many economies and posted record increases in the first two months of 2011, may push nearly 30 million Indians and 64 million people in the Asian region into extreme poverty, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on Tuesday. In...
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Workers may also get skill development under NREGS by Ravish Tiwari
With manufacturing sector growth in the Eleventh Plan period estimated at 8 per cent against 11-12 per cent required to create about 2 million additional jobs in the country, the Prime Minister’s National Council on Skill Development (NCSD) is considering recommending to the Rural Development Ministry that the UPA’s flagship rural job guarantee scheme (NREGS) be widened to include providing “skill development” to unskilled wage seekers. The issue is likely to...
More »Record food production in 2010-11
Exceeding 235 million tonnes, it has been the highest since Independence India's food production crossed 235 million tonnes during 2010-11 as per the latest estimates and this is the highest since Independence, S. Ayyappan, Director-General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, said on Saturday. The previous highest production, at nearly 233 million tonnes, was achieved in 2008-09, while the output declined to around 218 million tonnes during 2009-10, he said interacting...
More »Investing in agriculture key to ending extreme rural poverty in South Asia – UN
South Asia continues to have the largest concentrations of poor rural populations despite the fact that the wider Asia-Pacific region has made major strides in combating poverty, a United Nations agency said today, stressing that agriculture is key to poverty alleviation. The study by the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), entitled Agriculture – Pathways to Prosperity in Asia and the Pacific, shows that rural poverty rates have dropped only...
More »Too many in India by Alaka M Basu
Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the...
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