Full Coverage: Development

31.07.2006 Community forestry in this South Asian nation grew from a seed sown during reforestation of the stripped hills around the capital Kathmandu in the 1960s into a grassroots development movement that today includes some 14,000 users' groups and more than five million people, one-fifth of the population.

31.07.2006 The World Bank, as trustee of the Community Development Carbon Fund (CDCF) has signed two agreements with two Indian companies to promote technologies that may help revolutionize the building material industry—one utilizes a more energy efficient kiln to produce burnt clay bricks, and the other replaces burnt clay brick with fly ash bricks which are manufactured without the use of thermal energy.

28.07.2006 Setting aside ideological divisions, observers in India have endorsed the government's decision to quit the Doha development round of the World Trade Organisation, rather than compromise on the issue of the West's agricultural subsides that endanger the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of farmers in India and other developing countries.

28.07.2006 Following the government’s decision to throw out the Right to Education Bill and pass the responsibility on to the states, activists and educationists are planning a people’s campaign for a common school system, and a nationwide protest on the eve of Independence Day, when thousands of volunteers will court arrest.

27.07.2006 Twenty-five percent of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were teaching, during unannounced visits to a nationally representative sample of government primary schools in India. Absence rates varied from 15 percent in Maharashtra to 42 percent in Jharkhand, with higher rates concentrated in the poorer states.

26.07.2006 The U.N.'s World Food Programme has only raised 17 percent of the 5.4 million U.S. dollars it says it needs to buy and deliver rice and fortified wheat to 225,000 villagers in 10 districts.

26.07.2006

UN Study

A new U.N. report in India has warned that the country's booming economic growth could slow if HIV-AIDS continues to spread unchecked. The United Nations says 5.7 million people are infected with HIV in India - the largest number in any country in the world.

25.07.2006 In the official jargon of current Nepalese politics, armed Maoists who helped topple the world's only Hindu monarchy are no longer ‘rebels'. Neither are they 'terrorists' nor 'anti-government forces'. Instead, they are, to mainstream politicians, 'partners' and 'fellow travellers' in the mission to establish a new Nepali state.

25.07.2006 Even as the global trade talks collapsed in Geneva, India has blamed developed countries for not making substantial cuts in trade-distorting farm subsidies. The Doha development round of the World Trade Organisation now looks set to be suspended for the next few months.

24.07.2006 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the private sector that it has to contribute more than just investment in spreading education.The private institutions should have the freedom to play a proper role in providing education. But, the private sector should contribute more than investment in the field, he said, addressing the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Vidya Bhavan Trust.

21.07.2006 A high-level United Nations team will travel to Nepal next week to discuss proposed UN assistance for the peace process, after Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that recent developments have provided an “unprecedented opportunity” to achieve a negotiated solution to the 10 years of conflict in the Himalayan kingdom.

21.07.2006 The Union Government will shortly launch a National Manufacturing Initiative to give a thrust to 20 key labour-intensive sectors such as IT hardware, textiles, SMEs and auto components.

20.07.2006 An independent commission launched in New Delhi aims to get leaders of Asia-Pacific countries to stand up and take note of the daunting challenge posed by the spread of HIV/AIDS - including increased poverty and development setbacks.

20.07.2006 After securing sympathy and support for fighting terrorism from the G-8 grouping of the world's wealthiest countries in St. Petersburg, the Indian government is coming under pressure to harden its response to last week's Mumbai serial bombings, which killed 200 people.

20.07.2006

school kids

After twenty years of Operation Blackboard, India’s students are still huddled together in a single classroom and often have only one teacher in school. That is the scene in over 1.3 lakh schools in India
.

19.07.2006 As the death toll in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Java island's southern coast crossed the 500 mark, officials admitted to having been caught by surprise, despite the elaborate precautions taken after earthquake-triggered monster waves smashed into Aceh province in northern Sumatra in December 2004.

19.07.2006 Chewang Norphel has attempted to generate water and vegetation in barren Ladakh by simply creating artificial glaciers using stone embankments and a few hundred metres of iron pipe

19.07.2006 While the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act - if it is effectively implemented - is likely to have many positive consequences, one of the potential benefits that has been inadequately recognised is how it may improve the welfare of around 60 million children.

19.07.2006 The stand off between education officials and Intermediate Teachers Association continued on the fourth consecutive day. Normal working in the Education department remained affected and the employees continued boycott of their duties to mount pressure on the district administration to arrest the accused teachers for manhandling the joint director.

18.07.2006 Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) a indian name of Universalisation of primary education (UEE) has been conceived as a government of India national educational movement to achieve the target of UEE among all children. Distance education with the advent of digital technologies, has become an alternate or supplement to the conventional education