"The beat of a drum resounds from schools in Quang Tan Commune in Viet Nam as darkness covers its surrounding rice fields. The sound is the signal for local children to stop playing and return home to begin studying. The program for home study, introduced in June 2007, arose due to low scores in the area.

As the drum beats, the heads of villages call on children through loudspeakers to study, reminding parents to create good conditions at home for children to learn. To encourage pupils who get excellent results, the commune's study-promotion association will give VND150,000 ($9) to pupils who achieve excellent results at district level and also pass university entrance exams. VND50,000 will be given to pupils who achieve excellent results at school level."

"India's health care system remains the most privatized in the world, catering to a small section of society while the majority remain neglected. India's health indicators are among the worst; it has the highest number of malnourished women and children, four out of every five children are anemic, and 46 percent of newborns as underweight.

India's spending on health resources is among the lowest in the world. This bears strongly on equitable access to health services. Coupled with lopsided allocations, with 60% of health resources focused in urban centers, the urban-rural divide is growing stronger. Healthy living is not just about curative care but preventive care as well."

"The Kyrgyz Rep has announced plans to increase prices for electricity by 13 percent and water by 20 percent following an exceptionally cold winter that made hydropower resources scarce and led to frequent rolling blackouts. Increased tariffs were urgently needed to modernize the national hydropower sector. In particular, Bishkek's Thermal Power Plant-1, the largest in the country, will require up to $27 million for reconstruction.

The increased prices for hydropower coincide with double-digit inflation for food products and gas. This price hike in energy tariffs comes roughly a year after the Kyrgyz government rejected the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program. One of the major goals set by the HIPC initiative was to carry out administrative reform of the energy sector and invest in the reconstruction of its infrastructure."

"Cambodia is undergoing an unprecedented property boom that is literally changing the landscape of the country. It is also resulting in forced and unlawful evictions. Cambodia's land laws have gone through radically different regimes, and not kept pace with decades of war and dislocation resulting in massive movements of people.

While many Cambodians live on land, the ownership of which is clearly defined, many others do not have clear title. It is these grey areas that are the target of the current spate of land grabbing. A new land law that was introduced in 2001 was hailed as a step forward, but it is yet to be fully implemented. Specifically, the most progressive aspects require the issuing of sub-decrees that are yet to be passed. Other aspects of the law, such as strict limits on the granting of land concessions above 10,000 hectares, have been ignored."

"Innovative integrated approaches that target both implementation of sanitation technologies together with training and awareness raising are key elements of the Pacific sanitation program. Good examples of these approaches in the region include a rainwater harvesting project in Tonga. Coupled with the construction of household rainwater tanks, extensive participatory training was provided with the communities on maintenance and operation of the tanks to ensure healthy and hygienic behavior to provide safe and clean water.

Larger development projects are also taking similar approaches. The Sanitation Park housed by the Fiji School of Medicine focuses on capacity building of targeted communities on the design and use of common wastewater treatment systems and other simple but effective sanitation technologies. Cut-away, dry models of these toilet systems are available for community members, students and others to see and learn from."

"India expects to double port capacity to 1,500 million tons by 2011-12 by investing $25 billion in the shipping sector. The infrastructure sector will require investment of $500 billion between 2007-08 and 2011-12, which is key for the economy to sustain an average 9% growth. But the cash-strapped government is looking for a greater private role in infrastructure building and has been inviting foreign players to pour in more money and bring in their expertise.

Cargo handling volume in 12 major ports in India was at 520 million tons, while smaller ports contributed another 260 million tons during 2007-08. The government aims to double capacity in major ports to 1 billion tons by 2011-12, and raise it to 500 million tons for smaller ports."

"As the price of rice has rocketed, in some cases nearly doubling in three months, farmers in Thailand are eager to reap the benefit when they sell what their families do not eat. But the price rises have a downside and spawned a new phenomenon: rice rustling.

Local police have now banned harvesting machines from the roads at night while on the northern plains farmers are camping in their fields, shotguns at the ready. Across Asia the suddenly stratospheric rice prices have prompted countries to ban exports amid fears that shortages could provoke food riots."

"Papua New Guinea is in a much better position than other developing countries that have faced a resources boom in the past. But the question is can it be managed appropriately. PNG's 2007 GDP growth of 6.2 percent could make an impact on poverty and improve human development, but must be properly managed. The country's mineral revenue has increased seven fold since 2002, and last year earned the country about $700 million.

The great challenge though is to translate the growth that has and will be experienced in PNG into broad-base flows that go across all population groups. The resource boom -- in part sustained by high global copper, gold and oil prices -- will also be boosted by a new liquefied natural gas (LNG) project worth $10 billion."

"A poor rice harvest, rising global food prices and the continuing conflict are increasing food insecurity for hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans, UN food experts have warned. Only half the country's 20 million people are receiving the minimum daily calorie intake of 2,030. High levels of under-nourishment prevail, especially in rural areas and those regions in the north and east affected by more than 25 years of conflict.

Poverty and high energy requirements were also common in the rural agrarian areas. Some 14 percent of children under five in Sri Lanka showed signs of wasting (acute underweight) and stunting (chronic underweight) while 29 percent of children younger than five were underweight for their age. However, districts that have been affected by conflict record even higher rates."

"Pakistan's primary school enrollment rate is a mere 65 percent, compared to 75 percent in Bangladesh, 77 percent in India and close to 100 percent in Sri Lanka. Pakistan has lagged behind almost every other country in the world in terms of educational attainment for most of the last two decades. Not only the lack of literacy but also falling standards at all levels need to be addressed.

The close link between economic development and education needs to be acknowledged by accepting the fact that education is the responsibility of the state. As an initial step, funding must be enhanced to at least the minimum of 20 percent of gross national product."

"Over 2,200 children are working long hours in dozens of brick-making factories in eastern Afghanistan to pay off their families' debts. Up to 90 percent of the boys and girls who work in 38 brick-making factories do not go to school and are deprived of other means of education. Efforts were under way to establish community-based schools and facilitate vocational training for children in Sorkhrod's brick-making community.

Almost all of the 556 families that live in mud-huts and shacks around brick-making factories said they owed large amounts of money to factory owners and a group of brick merchants who have employed them as wage laborers. Debt levels vary from 40,000 Afghanis ($800) to 100,000 Afghanis ($2,000). Many families not only find it difficult to pay-off their debts but also remain trapped in a cycle of unending debt due to high interest rates imposed by some lenders."

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