Even as the media celebrate the Mercedes Benz deal in the Marathwada region as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the latest data show that 17,368 farmers killed themselves in the year of the “resurgence.” When businessmen from Aurangabad in the backward Marathwada region bought 150 Mercedes Benz luxury cars worth Rs. 65 crore at one go in October, it grabbed media attention. The top public sector bank, State Bank of India,...

An efficient delivery system is essential to keep up the achievements made by Kerala in the social sector over the decades, Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan said on Saturday. "Kerala has achieved remarkable growth in life index compared to many other Indian states. Now it is important that these achievements are maintained by improving the delivery system," he said, inaugurating an international conference on Reaching out to people: Achieving Millennium Development...

Appreciating the country's commitment towards universalising health coverage for the people, health economist Robert Yates has said the country needs to increase its public spending on health either by health insurance schemes or taxation.“The entire exercise of constituting a high-level expert group on universal health coverage that India has undertaken has been done at an appropriate time when the economy is growing and the country is getting wealthier as a...

For the Human Rights Day in 2010 the Asian Human Rights Commission presents the reports on the state of human rights in eleven countries in Asia; Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and Sri Lanka. The general picture that emerges is one of the failures of the states to carry out their obligations for the protection of people.Serious defects are evident in the area...

The latest Human Development Report, or HDR, (2010), marking its 20th anniversary, is both remarkable and useful. Remarkable because it brims with intellectual confidence, born out of a sense of vindication over the “conceptual brilliance and continued relevance” of Mahbub ul-Huq’s original human development paradigm set out in the first sentence of the 1990 report — “People are the real wealth of nations.” The idea of human development, which, through...