I must begin with two disclaimers. The Singur land development and rehabilitation bill, 2011 was moved in the West Bengal legislative assembly last Tuesday by the industries minister with whom I happen to share a name. However, I believe he does not share any of the opinions or sentiments expressed below. Second, I was a persistent critic of the Left Front government when it was in power and what I...

-The United Nations   Five United Nations agencies have banded together to call for urgently addressing gender-biased sex selection favouring boys, a common practice in many parts of South, East and Central Asia that they say fuels a culture of discrimination and violence. “Sex selection in favour of boys is a symptom of pervasive social, cultural, political and economic injustices against women, and a manifest violation of women’s human rights,” says a...

The first global report on disability reveals how the exclusion of 1 billion people – invisible in official statistics and absent from aid budgets – is holding back development progress The UN millennium development goals (MDGs) may not be met by 2015 unless urgent action is taken to address the needs of people with disabilities, according to the first world report on disability. More than 1 billion people live with a disability,...

-Rediff.com   India, home to a quarter of the world's hungry people with nearly 40 per cent of the population malnourished, is facing an unprecedented food crisis, international charity organisation Oxfam said on Wednesday. "Despite the doubling of the size of its economy since 1990, the number of hungry people in India has increased by 65 million because economic development excluded the rural poor and social protection schemes failed to reach them," Oxfam...

Oxfam, an international confederation of 15 human rights organisations fighting poverty and injustice, launched a new campaign here on Wednesday for a hunger-free world even as it announced that the number of hungry people the world over has crossed the billion mark and one in four of the world's hungry people live in India. Despite doubling the size of its economy between 1990 and 2005, the number of people in India...