Search

The article discusses how the pursuit of leisure drives internet use in the poor world. Topics discussed include connectivity in the poor world, growth of internet use in India, timepass as the essence of the internet, the use of the Internet in work and crucial aspects of understanding the second half of internet users.

The article focuses on a scheme developed by the Congress party of India known by its Hindi acronym NYAY under which it will hand out 6,000 rupees to poor households in the country if it wins power in the 2019 national election. Topics covered include action taken by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to address rural resentment, failure of the government to identify the poor and possibility for NYAY to become a reality in line with the electoral prospects of Congress.

The article details conditions in two sprawling slums in different parts of the world, the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India. In both places, inhabitants are packed together in primitive shacks with almost no utilities, and trash and human waste are everywhere. Despite this, the residents of both slums, most of whom migrated from jobless rural areas, seem almost content. Governments largely ignore the slums, and obstacles to improving them are discussed.

The article reports on how The Indian Ocean region is struggling to recover from the aftermath of the biggest earthquake seen for 40 years. The victims--many tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, millions coping with loss--were mostly the poor, vulnerable and remote. Entire villages of uncounted, nameless fishing people were swallowed by the sea. The tsunami wreaked havoc around the Bay of Bengal, from India, Sri Lanka and the low-lying islands that make up the Maldives in the west, to Thailand and Malaysia in the east. How many died may never be known. Across the region, hospitals and mortuaries overflowed. The tsunami battered some well-established tourist destinations where the travel business has brought a degree of prosperity. The cost of relief and rehabilitation will run into billions of dollars. Rebuilding their lives is the challenge facing the relief effort. It will be a logistical nightmare, since in many places, such as Sri Lanka, much of the infrastructure needed to reach the stricken villages has itself been destroyed. The tsunami, it was argued, offered some political hope of reconciliation between hostile communities: Muslims and Buddhists in southern Thailand, Acehnese and the Jakarta government, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.

The article discusses the trend towards microlending in India. Topics discussed include microloans offered to small entrepreneurs which can be repaid once their businesses start to make profits, the aim of microlending to help people get out of poverty, and a comparison of active microfinance borrowers in several Asian countries.

The author argues that the schemes adopted by competing political parties, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress party, to give money to poor people in India, need rethinking due to the difficulty of identifying the poorest in the country. Topics covered include number of people in India who live in extreme poverty, outcomes of the schemes launched by the Indian government to help the poor, negative effects of the BJP and Congress' schemes and the cost of eradicating poverty in India.

The article argues that the Indian government should replace the nation's welfare schemes with a universal basic income (UBI) single payment plan as of 2017, and it mentions how India offers subsidized food, fuel, and electricity to the country's poor residents. The impacts that artificial intelligence and automation are having on employment in places such as India are examined, along with India's economic conditions and the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), and bank accounts.

The article focuses on a poverty reduction measure in India in which all Indians were provided basic bank accounts with the accounts remaining unused by most Indians, and reports the success of the program was the result of bank managers donating tiny amounts of money, between one and ten rupees to their own customers.

The article focuses on microcredit in India. A new report from the central bank, the Reserve Bank, argues that microcredit helps the poor and allows banks to increase their business, enhance their profit and spread the risk. Microcredit is already a flourishing business. "Self-Help Groups" (SHGs), supported by banks, bring together women who pool savings for a few months, allocate them to members who need small amounts temporarily, and are then eligible for a bank loan. The finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, has promised to promote microfinance institutions and to help them to act as intermediaries between banks and borrowers. Despite its recent growth, however, microcredit is far less widespread in India than in neighbouring Bangladesh. Most of India's rural poor still do not have access to formal finance, a World Bank study found. Moneylenders are no longer as dominant as they were, but they still play an important role among the very poor. So there is a huge gap. Microcredit is a time-consuming business, where it is hard to achieve a big increase in market size without a commensurate increase in costs. Some see the solution in technology.

The article presents an editorial on the global fight against AIDS. The world is not winning the war against AIDS. By the end of this year, three million poor people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are supposed to be receiving the treatment they need. So far, though, barely one million are. At present, about forty million people are living with HIV, some five million are infected with it each year and over three million die from it. The human and economic cost is huge. India may well have more infected people than any other country. China's epidemic has the potential to dwarf all others. The lesson for rich and poor alike is that to contain AIDS morality must take second place.

The article focuses on India's creation of a biometric identity database for its poor that could held reduce corruption and poverty. It states that India's unique identity scheme will enroll 200 million members in January 2012 and could expand to 400 million members by the end of 2012. It mentions that a secure online identity would allow poor Indians to have bank accounts allowing them to directly receive government benefits and reduce graft and bribery by middlemen bureaucrats.

The article reports on the announcement that the Indian telecommunications company Bharti Airtel will raise prices due to falling profits. It is noted how many Indian businesses' are no longer able to offer many low-cost goods and services because it is not cost-effective and how that affects the poorest populations within India.

The article questions why poor democracies are not better at ending poverty. India, unlike China, is a vibrant democracy with a proudly robust habit of turfing lousy governments out of office. Yet, in poverty reduction, at least, China's unelected leaders have done better. A book by Bimal Jalan, a leading Indian economist and former governor of the central bank, lists some of the woes afflicting Indian politics, such as the rise of small parties, the dwindling of inner-party democracy and the shrinking role of Parliament in ensuring accountability. In poverty-reduction, as in growth, India is typical of other developing-country democracies, having achieved steady but not spectacular success. The relationship between caste and class helps explain the wide regional discrepancies in India.

The article focuses on Azim Premji, the head of Wipro, an Indian technology company, and India's richest man. Wipro is one of the country's biggest, fastest-growing and most valuable information technology firms. Since 2000, Premji has tripled his firm's profits. Modest and quietly spoken, he seems vaguely embarrassed by his status as India's richest man. Indian politicians seek Premji's counsel. The local press celebrates him as a symbol of India's emerging global competitiveness. But to Indian businessmen, Premji belongs to a pampered and resented elite. Such is the gap between rich and poor in India, and the proximity in which they live, that the information technology (IT) industry's sudden fortunes could be explosive. None of this is lost on the leaders of India's IT boom. Their problem is how to build community relations and spread the wealth created by an industry which is likely to employ no more than four million of the country's one billion inhabitants.

Technology firms have realised that fostering the adoption of information technology in the developing world would not just benefit locals, but is in vendors' best interests as well. Engineers and programmers at American computing giant Hewlett-Packard in India are working on low-cost devices for the three-quarters of Indians who still live in the countryside. Several centres--in India, South Africa, Ghana and Brazil--have already been established. These technologies are part of HP's plans to sell to the four billion poorest people at the bottom of the global economic pyramid. In addition, the company has invested resources in a project designed to set up "Digital Villages" and "i-communities" around the world--the former are philanthropic projects, the latter strategic market investments. Companies around the world are now busy developing low-cost devices and innovative business models to reach the world's poor.

This section presents economic news and statistics, as well as statistics on health and life expectancy, for 25 emerging market countries. In China, consumer prices increased by 3.0% in the year to November, up from 1.8% the previous month. China ran a trade surplus of almost $5 billion in November, the second biggest this year. Industrial production in India rose by 5.4% in the year to October. The stock market rose by 2.5% over the week. In Mexico, industrial production fell by 0.8% in the year to October. Consumer prices rose by 4.0% in the 12 months to November. The gap in life expectancies between rich and poor countries is widening, according to the World Health Report 2003. A baby born today in Japan can expect to live for 82 years, with more than 90% of that in good health. In Sierra Leone, however, average life expectancy at birth is a mere 34 years, with more than five of those years spent in ill health. The WHO advocates international assistance to reform health-care systems in poor places.

Discusses the controversial practice in India of a bus picking up poor people and putting them in jail, as part of the 1959 Bombay Prevention of Begging Act. Criticism that the act criminalizes poor people; Question over where bail money paid by the poor people actually goes; Small percentage of convictions of the people who are picked up.

Focuses on the threat to the livelihood of stonebreakers in Uttar Pradesh, India from the Forest Department. Rights of the Kols tribe to mine stone into gravel in the area; Statement of forest officer Biswajit Banerjee that the soil in the area is not useful for planting trees; Way that the land used by the Kols has been cordoned by the Forest Department for forestry purposes; Problems of poverty and disease among the villagers.