The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today called for a day-long, global hunger strike in solidarity with the planet’s one billion people who do not have enough to eat, ahead of next week’s World Summit on Food Security. “I shall personally begin a 24-hour fast on Saturday morning,” FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf told a press conference in Rome. “We are suggesting that everyone in the world who wants...

For a man who will inherit vast tracts of fertile farmland in Punjab, India's grain bowl, Jaswinder Singh made what seemed to him a logical career move -- he took a job with a telecoms company in New Delhi. "I can't go back to the village after an M.B.A. Delhi has more money, better quality of life. The job is more satisfying, and you don't depend on the weather or...

Exports from the world’s poorest countries should be granted duty- and quota-free access to markets, according to government officials, economists and academics attending a regional United Nations trade meeting as they warned against a turn towards protectionist policies. More than 100 participants at the first session of the Committee on Trade and Investment of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), which wrapped up today in...

In a recent lecture, delivered in Mumbai in memory of Nani Palkhivala, the home minister, P. Chidambaram, attacked “left-leaning intellectuals” and “human rights groups”, who, in his view, “plead the naxalite cause ignoring the violence unleashed by the naxalites on innocent men, women and children”. “Why are the human rights groups silent?” asked the home minister. The short answer is that they aren’t, and haven’t been, silent. There are very...

Ravi Gulati left a corporate job and took to teaching children of drivers, barbers and maids near his home in New Delhi's Khan Market. Today, in his unusual classroom every student is a teacher and every teacher a student. "I don't expect the kids to pay me back but pay it forward," says the man who has turned his home into a learning centre for the poor. A Ganesh Nadar...