‘Institutional delivery wrong measure of maternal health' Approximately 1.83 million children under five die every year As world leaders gather in New York to debate how countries have fared on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), nearly 15,000 children under five will die in India — mostly from treatable diseases like pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria and complications at birth. Save the Children, a non-profit organisation working for children, has urged India to show leadership...

As millions of children around the world start school this month, many are discovering something critical is missing. It's not teachers or textbooks - it's toilets. Poor sanitation doesn't just cause high rates of illness and absenteeism, but it also affects a child's intelligence, aid agencies say, with research showing that diarrhoea and worm infestations can lower IQ. Sanitation is one of the most wildly off-track targets under the United Nations' anti-poverty...

A leading rights group has accused India of hoodwinking the public over its claims of improving maternal health, as renewed efforts began at the United Nations to cut global poverty. Human Rights Watch said the government in New Delhi was wrong to focus on the number of women who give birth in health facilities as a measure of progress rather than how many survive the delivery and post-delivery period. The group's Asia...

With a gas-guzzler of an economy, India had been spending tens of billions of dollars annually to import petroleum. And so its 2009 policy on biofuels mandated that by 2017, India would have enough biofuel production to cover at least 20 percent of the country’s oil consumption. The government has in fact been encouraging the cultivation of jatropha curcas for the past seven years, believing that would be the fastest way...

International efforts to protect the ozone layer shielding life on Earth from harmful levels of ultraviolet rays have stopped additional ozone losses, potentially averting scores of millions of cases of skin cancer and eye cataracts, according to a new United Nations report released today. At the same time they have helped to mitigate the global warming greenhouse effect. “Today’s report underlines that action to protect the ozone layer has not only...