It has to be but a means to development, not an end in itself Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like...

India recorded 9.8 lakh new cases of cancer last year, an increase of about 80,000 new cases as compared to 2009. Top cancer scientists from across the country along with Union health ministry officials and experts from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) met at the annual review meeting of the National Cancer Registry Programme in Guwahati to discuss the worrying trend over the last two days. This figure was...

-The Telegraph   Indian plant biologists have sequenced the full genome of pigeonpea, arming themselves with information that they say will help speed up the development of improved pigeonpea varieties and boost yields of India’s most popular pulse. A consortium of scientists from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and several academic institutions has identified 47,004 genes that code for proteins in the pigeonpea (arhar or tur), a grain legume that is consumed...

The word ‘hunger’ does not appear in the 12th Plan Approach Paper even once, whereas according to the latest Global Hunger Index Report, India continues to be in the category of those nations where hunger is ‘alarming’. What is worse, India is one of the three countries where the hunger index between 1996 and 2011 has gone up from 22.9 to 23.7, while 78 out of the 81 developing countries...

CNN-IBN   'First world' health problems such as obesity and heart DISEase may be gaining ground in developing nations, but they are mostly afflicting the rich and middle class while poor people remain undernourished and underweight, a study said. Researchers who looked at more than 500,000 women from 37 mid- and low-income nations in Asia, Africa and South America found that there was a clear divide between the better-off and the poor, according...