-Outlook Lucknow: Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia today said the 12th Five Year Plan lays emphasis not merely on economic development but on inclusive growth to bring more poor and marginal people under its ambit. "The one point that I find reading the newspapers talking about the economic development is that there is a tendency to think that economic growth is a very narrow objective," Ahluwalia said while addressing the...

-World Bank Blog The enormity of the global job-creation challenge is underscored in a comprehensive new analysis by the International Finance Corporation, which issued a wide-ranging Jobs Study at a recent IFC forum  on the urgency of the unemployment crisis. More than 200 million people are now unemployed worldwide – with another 1.5 billion people only marginally employed, and with an additional 2 billion working-age adults neither working nor seeking a...

-The Hindu Effective spending, reworking the affiliation system and breaking academic bureaucracy are key to better universities Although Indian higher education suffers from many dysfunctionalities and the system overall is characterised by “pinnacles of excellence in a sea of mediocrity”, it does reasonably well by some international comparisons. Here are a few examples: — India is a global leader in terms of GDP spent by public and private sources on higher education. India...

-Outlook This could be the UPA’s worst cut to its beloved aam admi. Healthcare has virtually been handed over to privateers. Not For Those Who Need It Most Govt seems to have abandoned healthcare to the private sector Diagnosing An Ailing Republic     70 per cent of India still lives in the villages, where only two per cent of qualified allopathic doctors are available     Due to lack of access to medical care, rural India...

-IPS News Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution’s decade-long forest policy, expressing their “strong disagreement” with some assertions in the report. The assessment, written by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), the World Bank Group’s auditor, warns that expectations for poverty reduction as envisioned in the bank’s 2002 Forest Strategy “have not yet been met”. The report is particularly critical...