The health and women & child development ministries have refused to give an affidavit to the Supreme Court on how many children die of hunger in India every year. UNICEF says 50% of all the deaths of children aged below five years are from malnutrition. That works out to 2,438 children dying every day for lack of food. But no one in the government is ready to stick its neck out...
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Time For New Approaches says Civil Society by Claire Ngozo
The dominant approaches to development have failed the world’s poorest citizens and now the paradigm must change. This is the strong message coming from over 2,000 non-governmental organisations gathered at the civil society forum for the Fourth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV) in Istanbul, Turkey. Arjun Karki, spokesperson for the forum, told the gathering that the failure to see more LDC countries graduate from this most vulnerable classification...
More »Health budget may go up by 2% by Kounteya Sinha
India plans to increase its allocation for health to 2%-3% of its GDP over the next five years. Public spending on health was 0·94% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004–05, which was among the lowest in the world. Private expenditure on health in India is about 78% as compared to 14% in the Maldives, Bhutan (29%), Sri Lanka (53%), Thailand (31%) and China (61%). Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on...
More »Depriving dalits of their due by Jayati Ghosh
The arrest of Suresh Kalmadi on 25 April marked yet another scene in the prolonged drama surrounding the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in October 2010. Yet the general media focus on Kalmadi may have served to distract attention from the many other acts of omission and commission that mark the sordid history of that extravagantly planned and deeply flawed public show. In these other actions, there are stories of funds...
More »Status of Muslims in West Bengal by Maidul Islam & Subhashini Ali
Misleading data cited in a seminar paper on the situation of the minority community in the State tend to detract from the Left Front government's exceptional record on this count. Abusaleh Shariff, the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, who was the Member-Secretary of the Sachar Committee, presented a paper on the socio-economic development of Muslims in West Bengal, at a seminar organised by the Institute of...
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