Exposed, untreated excrement can kill by the million. One of the hardest-won UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a 2015 target of halving the proportion of those without sustainable access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. Even if achieved, the target would still leave some 500 million on the planet without this basic requirement for survival and dignity. As many as 79 per cent of rural and 46 per...
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Putting the smallest first
VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...
More »RTI activist gets threats over Mumbai land scam by Rohit Chandavarkar
Close on the heals of RTI activists Satish Shetty and Datta Patil being brutally murdered in Maharashtra, another RTI activist Anwar Shaikh has approached the Bombay High Court, saying he has received death threats and has demanded protection. The court has admitted his plea for hearing. Shaikh said: "I got a threat saying forget about the cemetery otherwise you will be shot, I said do what you want so he said wait,...
More »Get the government out of land deals by Abheek Barman
Two days after the government scrapped a bauxite mining project in Orissa, Rahul Gandhi visited Niyamgiri, the ground zero of the anti-mine protests and told tribals that he was their sipahi in Delhi. Around the same time, farmers in Uttar Pradesh said they wouldn’t sell their land at the rates the government was offering. India is growing fast, but hassles over the acquisition of land are going to be the...
More »India Holds Government Accountable For Millennium Development Goals by Pamela Philipose
Among the various definitions of "noise" is this one: "Something that draws public notice". And "Making Noise" is precisely what groups all over India are doing, or planning to do, in the days ahead in order to wake up the government to its promises. In the year 2000, India was among the countries that had signed on to achieve, by 2015, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals...
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