The world has made significant progress in income, education and health over the past 40 years, but the gains have been uneven and in some places war and the ravages of AIDS shortened life spans, according to a United Nations report on Thursday. Over all, average life expectancy around the globe jumped to 70 years in 2010, up from 59 in 1970. School enrollment through high school reached 70 percent...
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Nations agree on historic UN pact on sharing benefits of world’s genetic resources
After nearly two decades of debate, governments from around the world today agreed to a new United Nations treaty on managing the planet’s wealth of genetic resources – from animals to plants to fungi – more fairly and systematically. The decision came on the last day of the two-week conference of parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Japan. The new pact, which is a protocol to the...
More »Jarawas add 125 to tribe by Tapas Chakraborty
Ten years, 125 more heads. Hardly anything to write home about in these times of billion-plus populations, but anthropologists aren’t complaining. Not when the last headcount showed 240 and the people in question are a threatened tribe — the Jarawas. The latest report by the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikash Samity (AAJVS), a government-affiliated autonomous agency headed by the Union territory’s lieutenant governor, shows the Jarawas now number 365 — 125 more since...
More »India leads Commonwealth tally in underweight children by Himanshi Dhawan
India may rank second in the medals tally, but it is on top of the heap among the Commonwealth countries as the home to the highest number of underweight children. About 43% of India's children are underweight, and 7 million under fives are severely malnourished, says a new report "Commonwealth or Common Hunger", released by Save the Children, a child rights NGO. The report reveals that 64% of the world's underweight children...
More »Not counted by Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta
Delhi NGOs initiate a process to survey the city's homeless people and reach welfare schemes to them. IN the narrow lanes of Khari Baoli, Asia's largest wholesale spice and grocery market in the crowded Old Delhi area near the Red Fort, labourers grapple with heavy sacks of grain, pulses, and so on as they load them on to wooden trolleys or unload them from trucks. There is no room for...
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