The Director-General of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Dr. Jacques Diouf, announced at the Inter-Governmental Committee on World Food Security (CFS) that the combination of global food crisis and economic recession had taken the number of people affected across the world to over one billion. He described the number as “unacceptably high,” higher than in 1996 when the heads of states and governments committed themselves to reducing hunger by...

The number of Internet users worldwide has doubled in the past five years and will surpass the 2 billion mark in 2010, with the majority of the 226 million new users this year coming from developing countries, the United Nations telecommunication agency reported today. The number of people with Internet access at home has increased from 1.4 billion in 2009 to almost 1.6 billion in 2010, with 65 per cent of...

Trade unions and labour rights activists blame the high suicide rate in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, on the practices of the garment industry. TIRUPUR has carved out a niche for itself in the world of garments. Its phenomenal growth in the highly competitive global scenario, particularly in the past two decades, has been made possible by the entrepreneurial spirit of its manufacturers and exporters and the sweat and labour of thousands of...

When noted economist Jean Dreze visited Surguja in Chhattisgarh a decade ago, its utterly non-functional Public Distribution System (PDS) looked like especially “designed to fail.” The National Advisory Committee member has written in a recent article that the ration shop owners illegally sold the grain meant for the poor and “hunger haunted the land.” But that was then. The economist was pleasantly shocked to see the transformation this time. “Ten years...

Contents of a four-page letter from Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shows the country’s top judge recommending the inclusion of a specific clause in the Right to Information Act, 2005 to exempt judiciary from the transparency law’s ambit. The CJI in his letter dated September 16, 2009 pointed out how the “framers of the RTI Act” failed to visualise the extent to which...