New Delhi : Land belonging to Scheduled Castes and/or Scheduled Tribes will be the first to be earmarked for works under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and once this is saturated, only then land belonging to small and marginal farmers will be taken up. These are the amended guidelines issued by the Rural Development Ministry after protests that expansion of works under NREGA would undermine its benefits to Dalits....

WASHINGTON, September 15, 2009–Developing countries can shift to lower-carbon paths while promoting development and reducing poverty, but this depends on financial and technical assistance from high-income countries, says a new World Bank report released today. High-income countries also need to act quickly to reduce their carbon footprints and boost development of alternative energy sources to help tackle the problem of climate change. World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change,...

Why the provision of a good school education is the key first step.  The twin goals of Indian economic planning have been rapid all-round economic growth and equitable sharing of the fruits of development. The country has made significant progress in realising the first objective. But the second goal has remained elusive. After six decades of planned economic development, the disparities have widened and some three-quarters of the population are...

New York, Sep 10 2009 10:10AM: The number of children dying before their fifth birthday has decreased steadily over the past few years and fell to under 9 million in 2008, thanks in part to greater use of health interventions such as vaccinations and insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria, the United Nations Children’s Fund said today. Newly released data compiled by demographers and health experts from UNICEF, the World Health Organization,...

We normally assume that malnutrition is a disease of the poorer states, which the richer states are in the process of curing. It now transpires that malnutrition among women and child undernourishment, two essential markers of human development, are rampant in richer states as well. States with high per capita incomes such as Gujarat and Haryana have performed poorly in transforming the growth they have experienced into the well-being of...