-The Hindu ‘1.87 crore people were deprived of the benefits of ICDS' Gandhinagar: Though Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been waxing eloquent about the Gujarat model of Development, the latest report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India as well as the State government's own admission speak of malnourished and underweight children in the State. According to the government's own figures, produced by Women and Child Development Minister Vasuben Trivedi in...

-The Hindu JENVAC is the first vaccine to be manufactured in the public-private partnership mode India on Friday launched its first indigenous vaccine to protect children from Japanese encephalitis. Until now, the country has been importing the vaccine from China. The Vero cell-derived purified inactivated JE vaccine-JENVAC, which received manufacturing and marketing approvals from the Drug Controller General of India, is the first vaccine to be manufactured in the public-private partnership mode between...

-Down to Earth   This defies logic. Despite rapid economic growth, India has often been placed below sub-Saharan African countries that have very high number of malnourished children. But the government has no data to clarify its position. In the first week of September, Parliament’s Committee on Estimates criticised the government, saying: “The committee is surprised to note that in the modern era of Information and Technology, there is no recent official...

-The Hindu Not more than 50 p.c. urban, 70 p.c. rural families can get cards Hassan (Karnataka): The State government, which launched the Anna Bhagya scheme to provide Below Poverty Line (BPL) families rice at Re. 1 a kg, has now decided to put a stringent cap on eligibility. A recent circular directs Food and Civil Supplies officers to ensure that not more than 70 per cent households in rural areas and...

-The Hindu     Toll from foot-and-mouth disease reaches 1,485, mostly in south Karnataka Bangalore: The steep death toll among cattle from foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) could have been exacerbated by an unusually heavy rainfall this monsoon, even as an inefficient vaccination programme left thousands of animals vulnerable to the disease. While FMD (a viral infection affecting animals with ‘cloven hooves' such as cattle, deer and wild boar) is not fatal by itself, a secondary infection...