“This is a country on the make.” The speaker was a young assistant to one of India’s rising political stars. And from his perspective, it did look that way. We were sitting in the lobby restaurant of New Delhi’s luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel. That evening, the Taj was not only the place for a government reception following Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s decisive re-election victory, but it was also the scene...

Some 300 million children in South Asia, or half of the region’s under-18 population, suffer from chronic levels of poverty, according to a new United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) study presented today at the opening of a conference in Bangladesh. To combat the enormous amount of poverty afflicting children, UNICEF urged leaders across the region to strengthen efforts tackling the lack of food, education, health, information, shelter, water and sanitation for...

The Genetic Engineering Advisory Committee (GEAC), a regulatory body comprising of scientists which works with the Ministry of Environment and Forest, has finally waved the green flag for commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal in India on 14 October, 2009. The present recommendation of the GEAC has met with opposition from Greenpeace (http://www.greenpeace.org/) and a host of other civil society organizations. However, commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal may take a year...

Brazil and China have been praised for their efforts to tackle hunger, in a development charity's report released to coincide with UN World Food Day. But the ActionAid report criticises India and others countries for not doing enough to alleviate the problem. The agency also ranked rich countries, saying Luxembourg is trying hardest to end global hunger, while the US and New Zealand rank bottom. Studies estimate that one billion...

THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchfêted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...