The poster boy of microfinance is now seeking some anonymity. In Andhra Pradesh, the epicentre of the worst crisis faced by microfinance in India, SKS Microfinance is playing down its identity and going into preservation mode. At its modest office in a residential colony in Warangal district, India’s largest microfinance company has taken down its board. At its head office in upmarket Begumpet in Hyderabad, it hung a cloth mesh...

Policy-makers, media and government functionaries have had their say on implementation of the Right to Education Act, but the voices of children in this regard are yet to be heard, Child Rights and You general manager Anita Bala Sharad said here on Thursday. In an effort to factor in the views of children in the discussions on the RTE, CRY held a press conference in which six children from Delhi, Uttar...

To standardise implementation of the Right to Education Act (RTE) and to dispel misconceptions surrounding it, the government has decided to issue a rulebook to schools across Maharashtra with easy to follow guidelines. Though it was introduced in 2009, the state has now devised the draft rules to simplify the jargon-loaded Act. “Many schools have misunderstood the Act or are confused about its implementation. Earlier, we had issued government regulations (GRs) that...

The ‘Aichi Target' adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at its Nagoya conference could not have come at a more appropriate time. The journal Science recently published a study by Michael Hoffmann and his colleagues titled “The Impact of Conservation on the Status of the World's Vertebrates.” This presents depressing data on threatened species. The scientists conclude that four important factors — agricultural expansion, logging, over-exploitation, and invasive...

The Director-General of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Dr. Jacques Diouf, announced at the Inter-Governmental Committee on World Food Security (CFS) that the combination of global food crisis and economic recession had taken the number of people affected across the world to over one billion. He described the number as “unacceptably high,” higher than in 1996 when the heads of states and governments committed themselves to reducing hunger by...