India

India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said the world stands fractious, polarized and frustrated amid war, unfair trade practices, climate change and food and health insecurity. Trust has eroded, processes have broken down and countries have extracted more from the international system than they have put in it, enfeebling it along the way.

Over 18 million people in Bangladesh have been affected by severe monsoon conditions, with more than 1.2 million families trapped as flash floods submerge vast areas of the country’s east and southeast.

More than six million children in South Asia are at risk following severe torrential rains, flash floods, and landslides that have devastated the region, leaving many homeless, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned on Monday.

UN teams are working alongside authorities and relief partners to assist communities battered by a tropical cyclone that lashed coastal parts of southern Bangladesh and eastern India.

For farmers in the Punjab region of India, water shortages are a harsh reality, and ahead of the publication of a UN report Interconnected Disaster Risks, three rice cultivators have been talking about the challenges they face due to the scarcity of water and the solutions they are adopting.

While some 2.4 billion people live in countries where the supply of water is limited, global water demand for agriculture is expected to increase by 35 per cent up to 2050, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Wednesday.

The days when a few nations set the global agenda and “expected others to fall in line” are over, India’s foreign minister told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

In eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), increasing armed violence, forced displacement and devastating floods have fuelled deadly disease outbreaks and jeopardized healthcare, the UN health agency (WHO) said on Friday.

An independent UN human rights expert has called for India to release an activist imprisoned since 2017, expressing concern over his persistent detention and deteriorating health.