The huge support for what Anna Hazare espoused came against the background of widespread corruption and government inaction. THE Anna Hazare mania that gripped large sections of society for five days from April 5, resulting in the government capitulating to his demand for including civil society activists in the committee for the drafting of an anti-corruption law, has baffled many people. The groundswell of support for his cause took the...
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Bribes: a small but radical idea by P Sainath
To ask a people burdened with systemic bribery to accept bribe-giving as legal is to demand they accept corruption and the existing structures of power and inequity it flows from. Let's get this right. The Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, wants a certain class of bribes legalised? And says so in a paper titled “Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a...
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 »Tobacco will kill a billion this Century: WHO
Tobacco is a silent killer and the single largest cause of preventable disease including cancer, heart attacks, chronic obstructive lung disease and asthma. According to World Health Organisation, tobacco killed 100 million people in the 20th Century and will kill a billion people (ten times more) in the 21st. Deaths due to tobacco in India are expected to rise from 1.4 per cent in 1990 to 13.3 per cent in 2020....
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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