The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and World Health Organization (WHO) launched a new action plan on Monday to prevent up to 5.3 million children from dying of pneumonia – the biggest child killer worldwide – by 2015. Although nearly 2 million children die from the disease every year, with nearly all deaths occurring in 68 developing countries, relatively few resources are dedicated to addressing pneumonia. The Global Action Plan...

The language of rights has come into increasing use in India in public debate in the course of the last couple of decades. In this process, the word ‘right’ has acquired a more capacious and flexible meaning than is ordinarily given to it by the Constitution and the law. It is becoming more a matter of politics than of law, an instrument of political combat more than legal adjudication. If...

The philosophy of self-aggrandisement defies social logic. Seven leading banks in the United States of America had last year incurred an aggregate loss of $82 billion; the chief Executive officers of these banks nonetheless claimed and collected annual bonus to the extent of $38 billion. The economy might lie in ruins; that did not distract sharks from zooming in on their prey. Our corporate sector has shaped itself in the...

The rich countries blame India and other developing nations for the world's rising emission levels. Here is proof that the boot is on the other foot. Fresh data released by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change says greenhouse gas emissions from the rich nations increased by 12.8% between 1990-2007, the latest period for which figures are available. While the industrialized countries are now gunning for India and China to...

Reversing a downward trend, childhood immunization rates are now at their highest ever, but due to a funding gap of at least $1 billion life-saving vaccines still do not reach some 24 million children – one in five born each year – who are most at risk in the poorest countries, according to a new United Nations report released today. “The stakes are high. The WHO has estimated that if...