One week from now, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion. Because censuses are infrequent and incomplete, no one knows the precise date—the US Census Bureau puts it somewhere next March—but there can be no doubt that humanity is approaching a milestone. The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding...

The Government is finalising the blueprint for a scheme to enable a vast majority of the urban poor to own a house.   The housing and urban poverty alleviation (HUPA) ministry has proposed to stand in as guarantor for home loans up to Rs 5 lakh. Under the scheme, banks would be reimbursed up to 90 per cent in case the poor default on these loans. The scheme, targeting those earning less than...

-CNN-IBN   The Union Health Ministry did not act on early warnings over encephalitis. 500 lives could have been saved had the ministry acted on the warnings. CNN-IBN has learned that the ministry also sat on a field report from National Disaster Management Authority on encephalitis. Sources say officials from the National Disaster Management Authority met Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on September 15 and asked him to visit Gorakhpur immediately. The NDMA again sent...

Urban India's greatest comforts are the cause of a super-size health problem: obesity. Easy access to high-calorie packaged foods, sedentary lifestyles and a predilection for gizmos have resulted in almost 70% Indians in mega-Cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore or Chennai being overweight or obese, says a new multi-city survey. The profiling of 46,000 urban Indians-all of whom have access to the internet-showed that 49% were obese or had a...

At a time that land in urban centres, especially in the big metropolitan Cities, is at a premium, a Working Group of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has suggested that, as far as possible, slum dwellers should be resettled at the spot where they are currently living, rather than displacing them, so that they continue to remain close to their places of work. NAC sources said the Working...