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...

Washing hands with soap at critical times—before handling food and after using the toilet—significantly can reduce child mortality. Last year, October 15 was designated as the Global Handwashing Day and a worldwide awareness-raising campaign was started by the Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, an international initiative of which the World Bank is a founding member.   Schools and communities in more than 80 countries will participate in activities this...

The 2009 Human Development Report (HDR), released simultaneously across the world on Monday, makes a strong case for removing barriers to migration within and across borders, arguing that human movement had brought perceptible all-round benefits and held the potential to improve the lives of millions of poor and low-skilled people. Released jointly here by Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia and United Nations Resident Coordinator Patrice Coeur-Bizot, the...

It is well known that Amartya Sen is the greatest economist that India has ever produced. His credentials were well established even before he got the Nobel Prize. With his latest book — The Idea of Justice — he has also established himself as a world-class moral philosopher who could come up with great abstractions and generalisations that no other Indian thinker could achieve earlier. The Indian academia, so far, has...

After the euphoria comes the real test. The cost of implementing the historic Right to Education Act over the next five years by Centre and states works out to a whopping Rs 1.78 lakh crore. The new law will come into force from the next academic year and since right to education is now a fundamental right, it is mandatory on the part of the government to provide what is demanded....