Action Aid in a new report has said that close to one billion people in the world are suffering from Hunger and malnutrition. While the NGO has praised China and Brazil for successfully bringing down these numbers through community initiatives, India has been ranked low in the report. Brazil and China have been praised, but India criticised, in a new report that evaluates the efforts of developing countries to tackle...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Social and political dividends from NREGA by Vidya Subrahmaniam
In the final analysis, what makes any NREGA social audit worth all the pain and effort is the awareness it creates among poor beneficiaries. It is a measure of the hard labour that awaits NREGA activists in other States that a social audit conducted under blazing arc lights, and with so much official support, such as the one in Bhilwara in Rajasthan, could run into so many roadblocks. Virtually all...
More »Postmodern principles should form the foundation of JNNURM by Sameer Sharma
THE ongoing negotiations with the World Bank provide an opportunity to urban policymakers to reinvent the present form of JNNURM (called v1.0). Thus far JNNURM v1.0 has focused on upgrading macro-level dimensions of city’s environment, ignoring the social and economic diversity (e.g., mixed uses and building types) prevailing in urban areas. The top-down urban ‘renewal’ model underlying the present version of JNNURM is largely founded on the planning practices of...
More »Economic crisis exposes fragile global food system, new UN report says
The economic turmoil sweeping the globe has lead to a sharp spike in Hunger affecting the world’s poorest, uncovering a fragile global food system requiring urgent reform, according to a report issued today by two United Nations agencies. The combination of the food and economic crises have pushed more people into Hunger, with the number of hungry expected to top 1 billion this year, according to the Food and Agriculture...
More »Miss the wood for the trees by Sudhirendar Sharma
Age was no deterrent to his passion and determination. Till he lost to cancer on September 12, Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug relentlessly fought his arch enemy, the rust fungus, which had engaged him since he first landed in Mexico in 1944 to breed shorter, straighter, stronger wheat which were to liberate the world from Hunger over next decades. His brilliance of pulling India out of ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence is well known....
More »