India

Christiana Figueres from Costa Rica, who took over as head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) this July, said she expected rich countries to also indicate the “sourcing of $30 billion” that they committed during the last climate summit in Copenhagen. “The funding will be available, but the expectation of 100 per cent additionally may not be met,” Ms Figueres cautioned, refer

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Pricing Goes Against Objective Of Reviving Units To Curb Costs Rema Nagarajan TIMES INSIGHT GROUP Two of the three public sector vaccine manufacturing units that were shut down in 2008 have started manufacturing and supplying vaccines for the government’s Universal Immunization Programme (UIP), but their prices are now more than double what they were charging before they were shut down a

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The US says it will look to India to see what “changes” can be made to the nuclear liability law just passed by Parliament, in the wake of concerns over making suppliers of equipment also liable in the event of a nuclear accident. “We continue our discussions with the Indian government on this issue and we note that Indian business leaders are concerned about some specific aspects of the law th

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More and more Asian govts are focusing on public transport that's both mass-scale and rapid, and, generally, subsurface for better connectivity Barun Roy / New Delhi September 9, 2010, 0:36 IST A friend, visiting from Dhaka, recently told me something about that city’s notorious road traffic that was truly revealing.

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The country has made progress in reducing infant mortality but it is still some distance from its 2015 target Indicus Analytics / September 9, 2010, 0:39 IST According to the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations, India has the target of reducing the infant mortality rate (IMR) to 28 per 1,000 live births by 2015. Where do we stand today?

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A highly selective summary of the India Health Report 2010 Shankar Acharya / New Delhi September 9, 2010, 0:24 IST Last week saw the publication by BS Books of the India Health Report 2010 (henceforth referred to as IHR10), edited (and mostly written) by Ajay Mahal, Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari.

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It’s been often asked why our officialdom, with all the intellectual capital at its command, is unable to quantify the number of the really poor in India. Is this such a difficult thing to do? It is all the more baffling because in recent times, the debate on India’s poverty has only further confounded ordinary citizens.

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Teena Thacker The World Health Organisation’s 63rd Regional Committee Session in Bangkok on Wednesday discussed the drug-resistant “superbug” reported by the renowned journal The Lancet last month.

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Amitabh Sinha The Environment Ministry — which had been at the centre of a major controversy earlier this year following its decision to put the introduction of a genetically-modified variety of brinjal on indefinite hold — may still be able to exercise a lot of control in the proposed new regulatory framework for approval and use of biotechnology products in the country. The Biotechnology

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Back in 2005, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), now called Mahatma Gandhi NREGS or MGNREGS, was offered as a tool to liberate Dalits and weaker sections in rural India by giving them employment. Five years down the line, a Union Ministry of Rural Development-sponsored investigation has found that the scheme has become “yet another instrument in the consolidation of the exi

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