-The Hindu Why did the West Bengal girls’ welfare scheme win the UN Public Service Award this year? In 2014, Rehana (name changed), a 15-year old from a school in West Bengal’s Sunderbans region, was rescued from a red light area in Delhi. The Class IX student had been ensnared by traffickers who then sold her off in Kolkata. After being brought back, the local administration and a non-governmental organisation (NGO) re-enrolled...

-Business Standard/ India Spend 52% of India's agricultural households are indebted; with an average outstanding loan of Rs 47,000 India’s foodgrain production rose five times over six decades, according to 2016 government data, the latest available. But with the average Indian farm half as large as it used to be 50 years ago and yields among the lowest in developing economies, both the agriculture sector and farmers have been driven to the...

-CaravanMagazine.in In mid 2011, Diane Coffey and Dean Spears, both visiting researchers at Economics and Planning Unit of Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi and also assistant professors at the University of Texas at Austin, moved to Sitapur, a district in Uttar Pradesh, to conduct a study on poor early-life health and process of stunting among many Indian children. While Coffey attempted to understand the challenges of raising a baby in the...

A recent one-liner about the achievement of the present Central government goes like this: bovine has become ‘divine’ during the NDA’s rule. But why do such jokes originate? Media reports suggest that unprecedented aggression has taken place during the recent months in the name of the peaceful looking animal – cow. Mob lynching and killings by fringe groups have been reported from various parts of the country, especially targeting Muslims and...

-The Indian Express For a country that aims to be a regional power, the data on child nutrition confirms that the situation is abysmal. Save for Bihar, six of the seven states with the highest incidence of stunting, for example, are ruled by the BJP or the BJP and its allies – Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Bihar. After an agonising wait of over ten years, the...