The effect of labour-oriented schemes like MGNREGS and health insurance cover for 300 million people are yet to be captured, says U.N's labour organisation's report India has performed poorly in providing social security protection to its people until recently with “very high vulnerability” to poverty and informal labour practices in the world, according to the International Labour Organisation. In its first comprehensive ‘World Social Security Report’, which was released yesterday, the ILO...

Even as the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment — dubbed “the Indian Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” — released its first report on the impact of climate change in four regions of the country, it admitted that significant research gaps and lack of extensive databases were hampering Indian climate science. Long-term localised data was not available on vegetation and forest cover, socio-economic trends, farm inputs, pests and crop diseases,...

Twenty years is a good enough time to assess how countries of the world, irrespective of the economic or political system they follow, have performed in promoting human development. Successive Human Development Reports (HDR), since 1990, have mainstreamed health and education as critical indicators of human progress and contributed to international policy structures. For instance, the Millennium Development Goals, aimed at using international financial resources to reduce global poverty, can...

Launched 20 years ago with the simple line that "people are the real wealth of a nation", the United Nations' Human Development Report has become the most trusted annual indicator of progress in developing nations. The 20th anniversary report charts progress going back 20 years before that first publication - so it is an ambitious attempt to chart development achievements - or not - going back 40 years. The UN Development Programme's...

More public private partnerships are needed to create opportunities for the rural population India might have created its mark in the services sector — especially in information technology — on the global map, but the development of the rural sector still has a lot of ground to cover. Discussing how to innovate rural entrepreneurship towards employment at the India Economic Summit, various speakers called for increased public private partnerships to create...