The informal shipwrecking industry in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan truly epitomizes modern day labor exploitation as mentioned in this signal. In India we are seeing the formal dock workers teaming up with their neighboring shipbreakers in order to help them better their labor conditions.

“As tattered laborers wait beachside in a secluded Mumbai port, an aging ship making its twilight voyage runs aground, settling its hull into the sand before flopping, listlessly, on its thick steel side . The shipbreakers rush to the death scene of the expired vessel and, without hesitation, begin the long, laborious process of dismantling the scrapped ship by hand. Wading through toxins, pulling apart asbestos-laden pieces and inhaling oil, gas and other hazardous fumes earns them a meager wage for the day.

Most clean water projects fall into disrepair within five years, but the Changa Pani Program, founded on participatory planning and an integrated approach, has been highly successful in providing villages with reliable water access. Community participation, risk-sharing, and education/awareness campaigns appear to make the difference.

Intellecap writes,

Intellecap writes, "The Department of Information Technology (DIT) in India has formed a new policy framework on mobile governance. The goal is to create a set of guidelines for using mobile devices to expand access and reach of public services to all Indian residents. There are about 80 million Internet users in India and 771 million mobile phone subscribers. The Mobile Service Delivery Gateway will be fully integrated into the National e-Governance Plan."

Implications

The From Farm to Table project, facilitating sustainable urban farming systems around the world, targets key constraints to urban agriculture. The result is a set of strategies for making urban agriculture a bigger part of the national agenda, nutrition solutions, and urban economies. Among the key barriers are recognition and protection by governments, lack of market knowledge, lack of information access, and pollution.

Intellecap writes,

Despite Bangladesh's labor laws and the standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO) mandating that factories must provide healthcare to their workers, most factories in Bangladesh have no doctors or nurses on their premises and are not linked to any healthcare program. The Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association does have 10 medical centers for factory workers in the country, but they are short of doctors and are not adequately equipped. This leaves the approximately 3.1 million workers (80-85% of whom are women) without critical services.

"HealthNet Global (HNIG) is a private healthcare information technology solutions provider that is collaborating with a cell service provider Aircel to introduce an application into the market that will enable 3G medical consultations using smart phones."

Implications:

Sankara Nethralaya hospital, a not-for-profit ophthalmic hospital in Chennai, has "mobile van units that operate out of remote rural areas."

"Technicians offer basic eye-checks for the rural poor, and then the results are transmitted through a messaging service and very small aperture terminals (VSATs) to an eye specialist in Chennai. Roughly 60-120 patients are examined per day."

Implications:

The Sanjeevani project "combines the use of cell phones and computers to enable services such as Tele-consultations, Tele-education and Tele-diagnosis. Tele-consultations allow for patient histories to be placed online so they can be accessed by doctors in different parts of the country with ease. Tele-diagnosis allows specialist to consult with local physicians via video-chat and calls. This facility could prove to be particularly helpful to poorer sections of the society that live in rural areas, and have limited access to specialists."

The latest census data shows that Indians are aborting more female fetuses now than at any other time in India’s history. According to the data, there are now 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six. Female feticide is not isolated to the poorer classes. Factors for this trend in feticide can be attributed to easier access to ultrasound technology, as well as the reluctance of India’s growing middle class to pay dowries. “…As a family gets wealthier, it is unwilling to part with a share of its property to its daughters,” says Dr.