We reported here on TC-I couple of months back about India’s first sex-workers bank being set up in Mumbai. A group of sex workers in Mysore have gone a step-further and emerged as successful entrepreneurs. Organized under an organization called Ashodaya Samithi, the group of 150 female, male and transgender sex workers have set up [...]

Education’s Woes and Pros: A new study conducted by UNESCO reveals that less than 30% of schools have access to electricity and only half of them have toilets for girls. In order to address such woeful capacity, the Rajasthan’s state government has signed a public private partnership with UNICEF to expand education across the state [...]

There has been considerable discussion with regard to the role of Cable television in influencing womens’s status in India. Not long ago a couple of economists from the NBER used panel data in India and found that introduction of Cable TV increases autonomy among women, reduced incidence of domestic violence, increased female school enrollment and [...]

Last year alone, India spent Rs. 1,300 crore on the Polio Eradication Programme, with Rs. 1,042 crore more allocated for this year. Despite these efforts, however, the success of the past few years appears to have been reversed, as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has placed India on top of the world polio map, with [...]

India has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world – 300 per 100,000 live births.  In fact, over 20% of the world’s reported maternal deaths occur in India, most of which are preventable, given the proper infrastructure and resources.  The majority of these maternal deaths occur in poor, rural areas, where access [...]

Rural Supply Chain MokshaYug Access Gets $2 Million Funding from Unitus A rural supply chain firm MokshaYug Access (MYA) has received funding of Rs 8.35 crore ($2 million) from Unitus Equity Fund L P (UEF), an Unitus supported organisation to fund microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Asia and Latin America. The amount will go towards building [...]

In a report entitled, “India’s Malnourished Children: A Call for Reform and Action,” the World Bank warned that malnutrition is a problem with “dire consequences for morbidity, mortality, productivity and economic growth.”  According to a recent Reuters article, this is especially true in India, where millions of babies are born “underweight and then underfed during the [...]

According to international NGO WaterAid, India has the second worst sanitation access in the world, accounting for 43% of the world’s unserved sanitation population.  Moreover, as per a UNICEF country survey from 2004, rural areas of India are particularly lacking in sanitation infrastructure, with only 33% of villages using “adequate sanitation facilities.” The effect of inadequate sanitation facilities and [...]