Bhutan has asked world leaders to adopt "Happiness" as the ninth Millennium Development Goal at the UN summit on reaching the MDGs, in order to put and end to the scourge of poverty, hunger and DISEase. "Let us grow forth from this summit to not only rededicate to the eight goals to banish, DISEase and extreme poverty," said Jigmi Thinley, Prime Minister of Bhutan while addressing the UN summit on reaching...

Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...

‘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...

The India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) alliance have been honoured with the 2010 UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) award for their efforts in the fight against poverty. The award recognized India, Brazil and South Africa Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation (IBSA Fund) for their hard work in using innovative approaches to share, replicate and scale up successful development experiences for combating poverty and hunger in other parts of the...

India’s public health system has become dysfunctional. There is no reason at all why vector-borne and other infectious DISEases should recur with predictable regularity after every monsoon season. Government, especially state and local governments, must take primary responsibility for this malaise. Equally, civil society. A combination of governmental negligence and public apathy contributes to the unacceptably high incidence of DISEases like dengue, chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis, swine flu, conjunctivitis (eye flu)...