A Swedish architect has developed the PeePoo bag, a bio-degradable toilet bag that can be disposed as fertilizer. With the huge sanitation dilemma faced by city planners and urban slum dwellers, there is great need for solutions that can accommodate the 600 million people in India who do not have access to toilet facilities.

“South African FDI, along with flows from transnational corporations (TNCs) in other developing countries, such as China and India, had proved less volatile during the recent economic crisis than had been the case with flows from developed economy TNCs, which slumped markedly… [as such] emerging country investors like China and South Africa are expected to be more resilient than traditional ones, providing a potential buffer against further developed world economic stagnation and/or crises.”

Implications from Institute for the Future:

A burgeoning citizen movement in India is bringing a political voice to those who've traditionally been more on the sidelines in India's democracy. These programs are helping to institute greater citizen particpation in governance, leadership, and urban reform. Recent changes in the way money is distributed by the Indian government should translate to more self-determination at the local level, sidestepping intervening state bureaucracies. Some of these funds will be tied to greater accounability and reforms in how local governments do business.

According to Strategic Foresight Group Asian Horizons (SFGAH), a report given to the Planning Commission of India in December 2009 "recommended a new method, where the present national urban poverty line is taken as the basis for estimating every other poverty line in the country. According to experts, the new poverty line would factor in not just food requirements, but also those of education and healthcare that are important basic needs. Therefore, using this method in 2004-05 the percentage of poor was estimated as 41.8% in rural areas and 25.7% in urban areas.

In Bangladesh, NGO-run learning centers, operating outside the formal school system, find ways to education the growing urban slum children population that the formal system has not reached.

The Strategic Foresight Group writes,

The Strategic Foresight Group writes,

Despite India’s strident attempts to eradicate polio entirely, it continues to report cases of the disease. In the last two years, a marked increase of reported cases, particularly originating from certain parts of the country, has caused concern about the resurgence of the disease. A majority of these cases are reported from Western Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

A new system proposed by an innovation group in the World Bank will use cell phones to track efficacy of ground-level maternal and infant health services.

Intellecap writes,

Rainwater harvesting could play a significant role in water conservation in Pune, a rapidly growing city in India.

Intellecap writes that a record heat wave and growing water crisis in India are forcing politicians to measures to conserve water. Some organizations, like the Pune‐based Green Energy Foundation, are calling for increased harvesting of rainwater to serve Pune’s water needs. The organization has criticized the city for poor water management.

On October 20, 2010, India approved pilots of a new cash-transfer program for pregnant women and lactating mothers who are outside the formal economy.

Intellecap writes,

A trend towards “mega-regions” helped the world pass a tipping point—more half the world’s people now live in cities.

From The Millenium Project, South African Node:

The world’s mega-cities are merging to form vast ‘mega-regions’ which may stretch hundreds of kilometers across counties and be home to more than 100 million people. The biggest mega-regions, which are at the forefront of the rapid urbanization sweeping the world, are:

Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou, China—120 million people