Here’s a “growth story” that Standard and Poor’s missed: a piece of official statistics shows good old India has grown — literally. Over 5,000sqkm of wasteland has been converted into “net” usable terrain between 2005 and 2008, according to the Wasteland Atlas of India that was released today. Even Bengal, pilloried for profligacy and other wasteful pastimes, has done its modest bit to transform wasteland. But the big battles against barren land...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

-The Pioneer Almost 95.2 per cent of schools are not compliant with the complete set of Right to Education (RTE) infrastructure indicators. These shocking statistics came to light in the two-day RTE Stocktaking Convention which was recently held. The Convention aimed to address the pending gaps and detect the reasons behind the schools missing out on the deadline to meet the basic standard of education as highlighted by the RTE. The RTE...

Nowhere are the argumentative Indians more visible than in the cacophony surrounding poverty estimates. Poverty is declining; inequality is increasing; no one can live on Rs 28 a day; nine per cent of Indians are poor; 70 per cent of Indians are poor. Poverty is too important to be used as ping-pong between optimists and pessimists on the Indian economy. I am deeply disillusioned to discover that there are no certainties...

The ongoing debate over the incidence of poverty in India, often assuming surreal proportions, shows that there is indeed a ‘philosophy of poverty’ guiding current economic reforms. The loot of our country’s resources that is taking place both through these reforms, which continue to widen gross inequalities, and through the open plunder of our resources for private gain — as reflected in the series of mega scams — require the legitimacy...