-The Times of India   After debating the issue for over a decade, the government on Thursday threw open the multi-brand retail segment to foreign chains such as Wal-Mart, Carrefour and others in a move to attract overseas investment and dispel doubts about the coalition's ability to push through big-bang reforms.  After nearly two hours of discussion on Thursday evening, the Union Cabinet decided to allow foreign retailers to hold 51% stake in...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...

The anti-corruption movement has enabled the Indian middle class to feel smug about itself. Its members have gone through a vast range of emotions during the last two decades, from self-hatred to self-righteousness. Liberalisation of the economy has created for this class an excitement of many kinds. It has meant the freedom to pursue the quest for wealth without guilt and, at the same time, it has meant feeling set...

Despite 60 years of Constitutional guarantees and two decades after the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, India's children still continue to face grave violation of their basic rights, an independent social audit has revealed. “We do not have a National Policy for Children defining the ‘child'. In fact, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has time and again recommended that a...

Health is a state of mental, social and physical well-being and not merely an absence of disease or infirmity. To achieve this noble objective, India requires health care professionals who are trained in institutions with standardised infrastructure, and the availability of accessible and equitable health care for both the rural and urban populace. Recently, the health sector has been in the news — from the creation of a rural based...