* Secondary education is critical in breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. * The number of secondary school students is expected to increase from 40 to 60 million over the next decade. * India needs to prepare now for this expansion and improve the quality of secondary education provided. In today’s global knowledge economy, education plays a vital role in determining a country’s economic growth and its people’s standards of living. Importantly,...

The United Nations’ Human Development Report of 2009 paints an idyllic picture of migrations. THE recently released United Nations Development Report-2009, titled “Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development”, presents a strong case for governments all over the world to encourage human mobility. Migrations, including those of low-skilled workforce, pay dividends all round, the report says. However, it does not quite attempt to seriously understand why people migrate, sometimes subjecting themselves...

Global economic and financial crisis (2007-2008) coupled with food and fuel crises (2006-2008) has pushed the number of undernourished in the world to 1.02 billion during 2009, This has happened despite international food commodity prices declining from their earlier peaks, finds a newly released report of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, www.fao.org) titled: The State of Food Insecurity in the World Report 2009: Economic Crises-Impacts and Lessons Learnt....

A new international report slams the Indian government for not doing enough to end hunger. It says hunger exists in India because of a lack of purchasing capacity of the poor rather due to insufficiency of food production. Titled “Who’s Really Fighting Hunger”?, (see the link below) the Action Aid report which was released on 16 October, 2009 reveals that in India 30 million people have been added to the...

Action Aid in a new report has said that close to one billion people in the world are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. While the NGO has praised China and Brazil for successfully bringing down these numbers through community initiatives, India has been ranked low in the report. Brazil and China have been praised, but India criticised, in a new report that evaluates the efforts of developing countries to tackle...