-Employment News The article highlights the fact that the urban areas have failed to meet the demands of the increasing Population pressure resulting in large gaps in provisioning of basic amenities. Deprivation of such services has resulted in the expanding of slums with conditions unfit for human habitation. This article suggests that the government must take into account the limitations of its interventions for the urban poor and address the challenges...

-The Huffington Post Farmers are committing suicide as you read this article. In countries like India, the rate of farmer suicides has become a national crisis. The World Health Organization (WHO) is particularly concerned with farmer suicides because of the impact it is having on families. WHO estimates that one person commits suicide every 13.3 minutes. The U.S. farmer suicides rates are just under two times that of the general Population. In...

-FAO MDG target to halve proportion of world's hungry still within reach by end of 2015  Rome: About 805 million people in the world, or one in nine, suffer from hunger, according to a new UN report released today. The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI 2014) confirmed a positive trend which has seen the number of hungry people decline globally by more than 100 million over the last decade and...

-The Hindu Delay by States in specifying fresh criteria and completing verification More than a year after the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed, beneficiaries are yet to be identified as States have delayed specifying fresh criteria and completing verification. Even the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), which was proposed in 2011 as a comprehensive survey to identify socio-economic characteristics of the poor and to be used to identify NFSA beneficiaries, is...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Through a two-way process comprising text analysis of the policy framework of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme and analysis of empirical data collected through interaction with policy implementers, teachers, students, experts, etc, this article puts forth the argument that urban education system has failed partly because of the inability of the implementers to plan, manage and facilitate the programme. Monika Banerjee (banerjie77@gmail.com) is with the Zakir Husain Centre...