India is lagging in its effort to reach United Nations goals to reduce poverty and improve health and sanitation, but has shown significant progress boosting education, treating AIDS and addressing environmental concerns, a U.N. official said. “We are in a race against time with just three years left” to achieve Millennium Development Goals, Noeleen Heyzer, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, said last...

Students of the Women's College in Aligarh Muslim University are waging a bitter struggle for a facility their counterparts in other institutions would take for granted-access to the university's central library. Now, in a concession to these undergraduate women students, AMU has decided provided them online access to the catalogue of books. The varsity says the girls can choose the books which would then be issued and delivered to them. The 100-year-old...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

Last month, the turmeric farmers of Maharashtra's Sangli district found themselves in a desperate situation. Oversupply had resulted in prices crashing in the local turmeric market, Asia's biggest, threatening their livelihood. And with several thousands growing the commodity across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, any meaningful strategy to halt the price crash meant involving a sizeable number of farmers.  That's when local farmer Atul Salunkhe, 31, had a brainwave. How...

It is getting harder for jobseekers to return to gainful employment and for new entrants to find adequate jobs, says the ILO. THERE is little in the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) annual projection of job growth to cheer about. The year 2012 has been described as a year of stark reality. A third of the global workforce is currently unemployed or poor; that is, 200 million members of the 3.3-billion-strong global...