Now that it’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) week, expect a host of studies/ articles/ commentaries around how India has failed to meet the important MDGs, on how parts of India are worse than sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh when it comes to nutrition, and so on. The UN set the ball rolling when it said that “with just five years to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the country as a...

With more than 400 million Indians going to bed hungry each day, food security has become a crucial issue. On June 4 last year, the president made an announcement: “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban...

While global food prices declined for the first half of this year, they have spiked in recent months, according to a new World Bank publication, and this volatility could in turn push up the local food prices of the world's poorest and most malnourished countries. The Bank's grain price index had declined by 16 percent over the first six months of 2010 before rising that same amount between mid-June and August....

MONA SANGWAN, a teacher at a private school in Delhi, who earns just Rs. 4,000 a month and is her family’s sole earning member, had nearly begun to despair. How on earth was she going to raise Rs. 7,000 every month to buy the medicines her brother Ashwini, a kidney transplant patient, needed? Mona would have continued to despair had not the NGO Sarvohit Social Welfare Society stepped in. And to...

Bihar's programme of filing RTI applications through a call center is a novel one. The question is whether the model is effiicient enough to be replicated in other states like Karnataka. If you are in Bihar, you can get electronic goods repaired, phone numbers, buy things through call centres — and also file an RTI application. Zafar Hassan has filed two applications in the past two years through call centres,...