-Scroll.in Supreme Court guidelines have made it clear beneficiaries cannot be denied access to welfare schemes even if they don’t have Aadhaar, activists say. An 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand’s Simdega district has died of starvation last fortnight, months after her family’s ration card was cancelled because it was not linked to their Aadhaar number, say Right to Food CAMPAign activists. With no school mid-day meals available during her Durga Puja holidays,...

-TheWire.in ICDS plays a vital role in a country which is home to 190 million undernourished people – the highest in the world. Is the government of India planning to dismantle the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme, the world’s largest food security project? The ICDS is a unique outreach programme to meet the nutritional needs of ten crore Indian children under the age of six and to improve the nutrition levels of...

-TheWire.in Innovate methods are being used to encourage people to end open defecation, but issues like the underutilisation of funds and use of coercive methods to achieve targets remain. The government has run rural sanitation programmes since the 1980s. Yet, according to Census 2011, only about 30% of all rural households have toilets, and even fewer use those toilets. By contrast, under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, several changes have taken place. Efforts towards...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday announced ex-gratia payment of Rs 2 lakh to the next of kin of farmers and labourers who died due to pesticide inhalation while spraying crops in Yavatmal district over the last few weeks. An inquiry has also been ordered into the matter under the assistant chief secretary (home). Eighteen farmers were killed due to inhalation of 'profefonos', a pesticide used on...

-The Indian Express It underlined that the US government funded the 2017 report which estimated 40 million slaves in the world, including 25 million in the Asia-Pacific. WARNING that “global documentation on slavery is increasingly targeting India as home to the highest number of slaves in the world,” the Intelligence Bureau in a “secret” note has recommended a strong CAMPAign to “discredit” the information and a diplomatic offensive against it. The Bureau submitted...