In a small hamlet in Andhra Pradesh’s Ghatkesar district, 20km from Hyderabad, Indus Academy is one of four schools offering private education for the poor. Run by Career Launcher India Ltd’s foundation, its three single-storey buildings house around 40 children in the age group of 4-10. The walls of the school are festooned with bright-coloured pictures, and the school boasts a laptop, a television, a DVD player and plentiful study...

PONDICHERRY, India — P.M.L. Kalayansundaram calls himself a human rights worker. He runs an organization that provides a variety of services to villagers in this area — legal aid, financial assistance to help them organize marriage and death ceremonies, and free refrigerated coffin boxes that they would otherwise have to procure at exorbitant rates from private merchants. On a recent afternoon, he told me that he had been determined from...

Development models that focus attention on the poor while expanding job opportunities, increased government spending on social services and aid flows from affluent nations are all successful strategies for alleviating global poverty, the United Nations says. Access to low carbon energy and mobilizing domestic capital by, for example, improving tax collection, are the other factors the UN Development Programme (UNDP) identifies in a new report as crucial factors for the...

C.K.Ramachandran Consultant - governance, institutional reform and rural livelihoods   N.Narayanasamy SAGE New Delhi, India 2009 Pages - 363 Price Rs. 550   This is an exhaustive treatise on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) which evolved during the 80s and 90s as a reaction to the top-down approach to development. The book traces the evolution of PRA in considerable detail and attempts to distinguish it from several other related streams of participatory approaches some of which have vanished without...

The international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, opened a photo exhibition titled Starved for Attention earlier this month at The Times Center in New York City. The exhibition is part of a multimedia campaign on the crisis of childhood malnutrition that MSF is spearheading in conjunction with VII Photo, an agency created in 2001 by seven leading photojournalists from across the world. The campaign was conceived...