GoodNewsIndia :: The Sieve
Good news filtered from media streams
Page 23 of 38 pages « FirstP < 21 22 23 24 25 > Last » [Full listing]
Aug 11, 2006 : SHGs to fight militants?
There are close to 30 million women in India benefiting by membership in Self Help Groups [SHG]. But that’s no longer news. It’s clear SHGs are improving the lot of the poor. But a story filed from Assam by Nava Thakuria, talks of a visible connection between prosperity and peace.There are over 100,000 SHGs in Assam. Many of its members were sympathisers of pro-Independence militants but that support is now waning thanks to the success of SHGs. Men seek to marry women who are members of SHGs to assure stable family incomes. Takuria writes: “militant cadres do not dare put a ban on SHG activities for fear of a popular uprising against them”. Full story
Aug 04, 2006 : A measure of India’s knowledge potential
R Arvind, a final year student of engineering from the unfashionable Chennai suburb of Pammal and studying at an obscure college even further away in Tambaram has been given a $121,597 fellowship to pursue his PhD in the US. He had always been interested in missile systems. His project at the college was on minimising errors in missile navigation. An Internet search led him to discover that Prof Jay A Farrell at the University of California was working on the subject. The professor looked at Arvind’s work and offered him the opportunity.The modest circumstances of the young man did not matter once he rode the Internet highway. The story is both a measure of India’s knowledge potential and an indicator of how true genius is less likely any more, to die unnoticed.
Aug 01, 2006 : Gurcharan Das on “the India Model”
Writing in the influential US magazine “Foreign Affairs” Gurcharan Das highlights features of India’s unique development model. Unlike China and Asian Tigers, India’s growth has not been export driven but based on domestic markets. Because of this Das argues, in the last 15 years, the economy has been less vulnerable to global vagaries, led to increase in consumption of Indians, created a middle class of 250 million and generally been people friendly. There has been less inequality of incomes as denoted by a Gini index of 33 vs. USA’s 41, China’s 45 and Brazil’s 59.Das also points to other contrasts: entrepreneurial intiatives instead of government’s, services creation instead of manufacturing, rises in productivity instead of investment capital, high tech instead of low tech etc are the notable features of India’s emerging success. The long article is a review of the good and bad of the last decade and a half of India’s reform years. Read it here.
Page 23 of 38 pages « FirstP < 21 22 23 24 25 > Last » [Full listing]