Poverty & Hunger

27.06.2006 Vancouver, Canada: Mayors from around the world gathering at the World Urban Forum pledged to use their power, influence and voice to mobilize the political will needed to meet the globally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight concrete goals aimed at reversing the worst aspects of global poverty by 2015.

23.06.2006 Community leaders from Mehdiganj in north India began a hunger strike to demand the closure of the Coca-Cola bottling plant. The leaders have accused the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Mehdiganj of creating severe water shortages affecting over twenty villages, polluting agricultural land and groundwater, illegally occupying land, evading taxes and treating workers unfairly.

23.06.2006 South African women living in squatter settlements build new homes, about 18,000 of them. Tens of thousands of new homes and many new police stations are coming up in Bombay slums. Neither is the result of a government programme, or of some kindly NGO. At both places local people have combined with government agencies in bold new ways to improve their homes and their lives.

05.06.2006 Away from the cacophony of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), prowess in information technology and the growing GDP, students from the University of Michigan, on a visit to India, got a taste of the real India – water problems, low literacy, poor infrastructure, ill-managed cities and rural poverty.

01.06.2006 Following the advice of a World Bank report India: Unlocking Opportunitites for Forest-Dependent People, the Andhra Pradesh State Government plans to revise the Andhra Pradesh Forest Act, 1967 to increase its income from forest revenue. The report says that India's forest income can increase by $2 million by 2020.

01.06.2006 The Pakistani government has proposed a three-year plan to gradually close all Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. Some of these camps are a quarter of a century old and still house many who fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.