The following is a guest post by Jason Ye, a MD/MBA student at Columbia University and an InSITE fellow alongside yours truly. Jason visited India during his spring break on a project organized by Columbia’s International Development Club and worked on pro bono consulting project with LifeSpring Hospitals. Go here for a post on this [...]

According to story today on Business Standard, M-Cril, the credit rating agency is launching a platform called ‘Capital Connect’ which will enable MFIs and social enterprises to access capital from investors looking to make investments in this space. This is seen as early precursor to a equity exchange for ‘social investments’ – in other words [...]

Outsourcing: Higher-skilled jobs are the next step up from lower-value business process outsourcing and are known as Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). A Times article features KPOs and discusses how they approach jobs such as legal outsourcing. Health: In its latest budget, the Indian government outlines several plans for increasing health services in the country, including [...]

Two stories display how there are possibilities for creativity in supplementing Indian education and providing more options for students. OneWorld South Asia reports on FM stations in Bihar that will set up shop in high schools: The channels would host phone-in programmes featuring guest lectures, career counselling, and quizzes based on general and subject knowledge. [...]

India’s coastlines extend a distance of 7,500 kilometers and are contiguous with 8 states, including Orissa, West Bengal, Andra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Goa, and Maharashtra. In 2 recent posts entitled, “Predicting a Shift: Climate Migrants” and “Mumbai in 2100: Underwater“, we spoke to the displacement risk faced by coastal inhabitants as a result of [...]

Echoing Green has announced its Fellowship Finalists for 2008, a pool of organizations chosen from a whopping, record-setting, 1500 applications. You can see the list here. The below video provides a good introduction to what Echoing Green does. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkPRA4BR4Cg] If you are one of the finalists and working in India, get in touch with us [...]

Saturday afternoon news: Social welfare: The Government of Himachal Pradesh is planning to issue separate ration cards to single widows in the state to enable them draw benefits under various state social welfare programmes. (Source: iGovernment) Health research: Using supercomputing simulations and lab experiments, an IBM research team plans to accelerate the design of drugs [...]

State weakness report: Brookings Institute ranks India 67th out of 141 states in their new report that measures state weakness based on the criteria of economic, political, security and social welfare. Technology: Google released today Voice Search in Hyderbad which enables users to find business, restaurants, etc. by speaking the query into their mobile. In [...]

In a speech yesterday, World Bank President Robert Zoellick looked to take the multilateral organization in new directions in the way it view global issues and development. [Source: Center for Global Development] Zoellick’s detailed and wide-ranging speech included a proposal for what he called a “one-percent solution” — for sovereign wealth funds to invest one [...]

Kavita Ramdas, the current President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women sat down with Britt Bravo of Have Fun Do Good, to speak on women’s rights across the globe. “I think there are many different ways in which you define leadership. As a feminist, and as a feminine feminist, I truly believe that [...]