-The Indian Express This year's edition of the Human Development Report contains a set of practical recommendations The 2014 Human Development Report (HDR) draws attention to the urgent need to address human vulnerabilities and build resilience as conditions for accelerating and sustaining progress. Human insecurity stems from not only low and uncertain incomes, but from many other sources, including inadequate access to health, food and shelter, unsafe environments, and inadequate protection of...

-The Hindu Business Line Hyderabad: The news of 11,772 farmers committing suicide did not hit the headlines when the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) released its data for 2013 early this week. The gravity of the problem somehow didn't get the attention it deserved. Perhaps, we are quite used to the numbers since they have always remained north of 10,000 in the last few years. Those who closely follow developments in Indian...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India continues to lag on human development indicators in spite of a slew of welfare programmes, with a UNDP report released today ranking it 135th among 187 countries that were judged on progress in areas such as life expectancy, education, income and employment.   Analysts blame India's poor performance on lack of accountability in implementation of the welfare programmes. Former National Advisory Council member N.C. Saxena said state governments...

-Down to Earth Blog The performance of nutrition indicators amongst Dalits is improving, it is nowhere near the catch-up pace Does a new government and a strong Prime Minister claiming to hail from the backward caste augur Achche Din for Dalits too? We hope so! But political commitment-or lack of it-has multiple manifestations. In a deeply stratified society like India with entrenched elitism, people from the Scheduled Caste (referred to as Dalits...

-The Hindu   India is among the world champions of social underspending. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one Few people today remember the letter written on August 7, 2013 by Mr. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this letter, available on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) website, Mr. Modi criticised...