-Outlook Itanagar: In pursuance of the Centre's initiative to ensure food for all, Arunachal Pradesh today launched the National Food Security Ordinance (NFSO) 2013 commemorating the birth anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi. As per the provisions of the Ordinance, a person belonging to priority households would be entitled to receive 5 kg of food grains per person per month at subsidised price. Supply of rice is to be made available to the eligible persons...

-Economic and Political Weekly Indian children are very short, on average, compared with children living in other countries. Because height reflects early life health and net nutrition, and because good early life health also helps brains to grow and capabilities to develop, widespread growth faltering is a human development disaster. panagariya acknowledges these facts, but argues that Indian children are particularly short because they are genetically programmed to be so. In...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Notwithstanding strong warnings by the parliamentary standing committee on health, new drugs continue to be approved for marketing in the country without holding any clinical trials on Indian patients to test their safety and efficacy. Sources in the Health Ministry admit that as many as 26 new drug molecules have been approved since 2010 without testing them through drug trials on local populations. While eight new drug molecules of biologicals...

-Economic and Political Weekly In his article, "Does India Really Suffer from Worse Child Malnutrition Than Sub-Saharan Africa?", Arvind panagariya makes an impassioned case against accepting traditional measures that indicate that Indian children suffer from worse malnutrition than their African counterparts. This phenomenon - that Indian children are more stunted despite the country's better performance on an array of other health and development indicators was dubbed the "South Asian Enigma" in...

-Economic and Political Weekly In his article Arvind panagariya argues that (a) the prevailing narrative of child malnutrition being worse in India "than nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries with lower per capita incomes" is false, (b) that this notion is an "artefact of a faulty methodology", and (c) that the nutrition situation and recent trends in India are not so bad anyway. Please click here to read the entire article. ...