South Asia

I sit writing this article when the situation in West Asia seems to be somewhat in control. The Islamic State or Daesh is reported to have fallen and lost its strongholds from much of Iraq and Syria. The question however is, “Does the Islamic State losing its territorial hold necessarily imply a complete elimination of the threat of Islamic terror, or is it merely a break before it metamorphoses into an organized power that is deadlier?”

Linked to the social ritual of marriage in India is also the sense of fulfillment of “familial obligation” towards one’s children in “getting them married” at the right time. It would not be wrong to see marriages in this light as no less than a “necessary” social security investment at the “right time” for perpetuation of one’s legacy.

“Entrepreneurship” by definition is an attitude to create something new, through an activity which creates value in the socio-economic system. This attitude primarily stems from a state of mind which develops naturally as a product of one’s surroundings and experiences. It all comes down to looking at life and career a certain way.

The dramatic increase in violence against women in India in the past decades has been all too well reported in domestic and international newspapers. Although the statistics speak for themselves, it's nevertheless important to understand that the issue is more global than local. Crimes against women in India will serve here as merely case studies for this persistent social plague which afflicts nearly half of the population of the world.

With gender bias becoming an increasingly hot topic, the number of those fighting gender discrimination against women in India is growing every day. But is it enough to change traditions and customs rooted centuries of prejudice and unfair treatment?

The role and status of women in India is a very hot issue that is passionately debated every day, as ever more women become conscious of the inequalities and bias they suffer from. All around the world, women are an untapped "resource" to fight poverty and violence. And even though their potential has been very clearly revealed time and again in difficult circumstances (world wars, independence movements) men have too often lost sight of it in times of stability.

The state of the healthcare system in India today is a perfect representation of the impact of the unregulated globalization and privatization. Permeating India's health policies in the past 20 years, they have been discriminating against the poorer population in the country.

Challenges of urban poverty in India are intimately tied with challenges of the country’s fast development. Indian cities have come to dominate the charts as the world’s biggest cities for the first time in modern history. (Header photo courtesy of Akshay Mahajan)

Bribery exists everywhere and in many different forms, but corruption in India sometimes looks like a civil servants' favorite contest nationwide. Since 2005, India has been ranking around the middle (90 out of 180) of Transparency International's league table of country perception of corruption by the people (including investors, businessmen, etc).

The causes of poverty in India are nothing short of complex but a lot of progress has been made to tackle them. So, here we'll focus more specifically what’s been done to alleviate poverty so far and what is still holding things back.

Despite the country's meteoric GDP growth rate (about 9%), poverty in India is still pervasive; especially in rural areas where 70% of India’s 1.2 billion population live. It is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and yet its wealth is hardly redistributed across the population.

Poverty in Pakistan spreads across a variety of issues: a very fast-growing population facing lack of education, jobs, technology, capital and investment. But the country is committed to tackling the problem and the poverty rate has fallen by more than 10% in the mid-2000s. That’s nearly 15 million people who were lifted out of poverty.

For decades, poverty in Bangladesh was more concentrated than any other place in the world. What does it mean? Simply that the country has one of the highest percentage of poor people per square mile.

Poverty in Asia (including the Asia-Pacific region) is a widely disparate region to cover because of the gigantic differences between countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and the Philippines. As a consequence, no one should rely too much on any Asia-wide statistics on poverty because the region is just too diverse to be summed up in stats. The achievements of South Korea and China for example will most likely hide the issues in Cambodia or Vietnam for example.

Recent numbers show that, in proportion, child labor in India is declining (a little less than 5% of children). But when looking at absolute numbers, we see that more children than ever are faced with forced labor, which denies them the right to an education and a normal childhood.