-The Business Standard   Latest HDR a poor report card for India The good news from the Human Development Report, or HDR, for 2011 is that India’s rank – 134 out of 187 – has remained unchanged. If we look at countries relevant to India – fellow BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa) and India’s neighbours (Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) – four have held their positions and three countries have...

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet.  But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...

The United Nations unveiled its 22nd annual Human Development Report on Wednesday, with grave warnings that unless countries take action against climate change and implement sustainable solutions, progress in human development will be in serious jeopardy. Trends over the past 40 years indicate extraordinary progress in health and education in some of the world's poorest countries, and if those trends continue, by 2050, most countries will have achieved or surpassed standards...

-EPW   The media noise shed little light on the important issues involved in deciding the coverage of welfare programmes. The context for the Planning Commission’s (PC) affidavit on the official poverty line was the deliberation in the Supreme Court on how many people could be covered by the public distribution system (PDS). But while the sound and fury over the poverty line – Rs 32 per capita per day in the urban...

-Express News Service   For a country making strides as an emerging economic power, gender inequality remains an area where it compares poorly with the rest of the world. India is placed 129th among 146 countries in terms of GII, or gender inequality index, far behind neighbouring Sri Lanka at 74 and lagging most other countries in the region. Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan are ranked 112, 113 and 115 in terms of this...